


Stopwatch Hearts

by chewysugar



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Blow Jobs, Dean's POV, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Hand Jobs, M/M, Masturbation, Mild Angst, POV First Person, Post-Episode: s05e22 Swan Song
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-20
Updated: 2017-02-28
Packaged: 2018-09-18 18:07:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 25,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9396974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chewysugar/pseuds/chewysugar
Summary: Sam wanted him to move on, but Dean doesn't know how. Luckily for him he's got Castiel. Only, he isn't quite sure exactly when his feelings about his angel started to change.





	1. Five Hours

I didn't live the apple pie life the way Sam wanted me to. I got damn near close. About six feet from Lisa and Ben's place, but I chickened out at the last moment.

What can I say? Performance anxiety.

That, and I didn't wanna go bringing the legions of Hell and Heaven and all their many sub-sections to Lisa and Ben's doorstep. Besides, I had more baggage than O'Hare during peak period on Christmas Eve. Kinda comes with the territory of having been in Hell for what seems like a hundred years and seeing your little brother--both of them, actually--jump into a place built and furnished for the Devil himself.

So yeah. No apple pie life for me. Less than an hour after the Apocalypse came and went, I was in a motel room outside Nantucket, staring at the ugly blue-white glare of the television from my bed. There was a Nic Cage marathon playing. Guy is ugly as all sin and yet for some reason he keeps making movies. Gotta admire his grit I guess.

Tenacity, Sam would probably call it.

I'd asked for two queen sized beds pretty much without thinking. Old habits die hard. So did all the people I've ever been close to. I'd like to say that I got lost in the heightened melodrama and badly written lines of _Gone in 60 Seconds_ , but I didn't. I just kinda sat there in the dark, watching without really seeing or hearing anything.

I'm pretty sure Angelina Jolie got naked at one point. Sure as hell won't be putting myself through that movie again to find out.

My eyes started watering, but it was from the TV screen. Mom once said that watching TV in the dark would make you go blind. And then she died. Again, like everybody else.

It was harder than anything I'd ever had to handle at that point. I knew I couldn't fix it by going out and locking lips with a Crossroads demon again. Sam was beyond my reach, and they wouldn't wanna help me.

I hated everything at that point: Heaven and Hell, my old man, Sam for having been the hero again.

And myself.

The whole kit and kaboodle could really be laid (lain?) at my feet. I was the one who got the attention of Biblical forces by bringing Sam back with that original deal. Couldn't leave well enough alone. I've never been able to on the best of days anyway.

I started to wonder what would happen if I went out to Baby, grabbed the nearest shotgun and blew my head off with it. The motel staff would hear the noise; probably call the cops first. Might take them a good five minutes to show up if they didn't stop for donuts. They'd break down the door and find my body on the bed without having to turn the lights on. What would be left of my head would still be smoking from the gunshot; rigor would probably already have set in; I might still be holding the gun by the barrel.

I blinked.

_ Gone in 60 Seconds _ wasn't playing on the TV anymore. Meg Ryan was on screen performing open heart surgery on somebody. Nic Cage was behind her. I didn't know that they'd ever shared screen time. I don't remember picking up the remote, but I must've. The movie was called _City of Angels_. Some chick flick. The notion that badass, flank-steak faced Nicolas Cage had made a chick flick made me laugh a little.

And then a lot.

Pretty sure I sounded The Joker levels of nuts to the john and hooker sharing the suite beside mine.

Besides, the movie got angels all wrong. Even my angel wasn't as brooding and emo as the one Nic Cage was playing.

My angel?

Yeah.

Castiel was really _my_ angel when I thought about it. He'd saved me, bailed me out more times than I could shake a dead cat at. But my angel was gone, took to the skies to make sure Heaven didn't turn into Europe after World War Two.

I missed _my_ angel. At least he was always around. At least I could still reach him if I tried. But I didn't want to then, didn't want to hear from him that he had better things to do than keep me company and make sure I didn't blow my brains out or off myself in the bathtub.

Somehow I tuned back into _City of Angels_. It was even worse than _Gone in 60 Seconds_ , which is saying something. I wonder if Nic Cage is actually a comedic genius like Robin Williams and just likes taking the piss out of people by making them think he's a serious actor?

Meg Ryan was walking around her apartment while Alanis Morrisette played when I realized that I wasn't by myself in the room anymore. I didn't go on high alert the way I used to when I felt like something was trying to get the jump on me. At that point a unicorn could have waltzed in through the front door and I probably would have run into its horn just to get the job done.

Cas was sitting on the bed beside me, his legs over one side, his head turned to the movie.

"The hell are you doing here?"

"You needed me." He frowned and added, "I don't understand this movie. Is the blonde woman in love with the horse faced man?"

"Yeah. Fucked up, isn't it?"

Cas was silent for a moment. I didn't know if he really gave a damn about the movie.

I sure as shit didn't.

"What are you doing here, Cas? I thought you were dedicating the rest of eternity to micromanaging Heaven?"

"I don't like it up there."

I snorted. "Neither did I."

"It isn't the same anymore, Dean. They all want to fill the seat left by God and all the other ones left by the archangels." He clenched his eyebrows together. "There are too many hands in the soup. Is that the right expression?"

"Something like that." I sighed and leaned back against the pillows. I felt my exhaustion kicking into turbo at that point. I hadn't wanted to nod off because...well frankly because I knew I'd wake up and think for about a minute that everything that had happened in that field had been a dream. Then when it hit me that it hadn't been I probably would have gone straight for the suicide solution and then _I_ would have been the one being gone in sixty seconds.

"You need to rest," Cas said, looking away from the over the top sex scene now playing on the television. Neither of the actors were in their prime. It was kind of funny, but in a really sad way. "And please stop thinking about committing suicide, Dean."

"Great. He reads minds now."

"Only when you think about me. I could hear you all the way from Australia."

"The hell were you doing down under?"

Cas didn't say anything for a second. He never was one for slang, even slang that most people know. But he caught up eventually. "There is a woman down there that the demons are trying to set up as a musical act. They want her to destroy the Muses."

"Fantastic."

"It's nothing to concern yourself with, Dean. We took away her musical talent. Even if Iggy Azalea does make it onto your radio stations, she will not have any power."

"That why you came running? 'Cause you were done with this Igloo Australia chick?"

"No. As I said, I heard you. You were thinking about me, so I listened. You started thinking about killing yourself and I came to stop you. But you weren't actually going to, were you?"

"I don't know anymore, Cas." Him bringing it up only made me feel even more tired.

I closed my eyes, and pretty much lost all desire to ever open them again.

"I am sorry," Cas said quietly, and I didn't need any great goddamn GPA to know what he meant. "I wanted to stop it, Dean. I tried."

"I know you did. Kinda hard to forget you being blown up right in front of me, Cas."

That was another thing I wished I could kill from my many traumatic memories. Cas exploding in a shower of bloody bits thanks to Lucifer in Sam's body. It wasn't something I was ever going to forget. "It's just...I'm not used to being alone, y'know?"

"Which was why you thought it necessary to seek out the Crossroads Demon."

"Yeah."

"You can't do that now."

"I know." I wanted to be angry, but I couldn't find the energy. "He's farther off then gone, isn't he?"

"Yes. I'm sorry."

"Not you fault, featherbrain." I stretched and yawned. I didn't really give a crap about what was happening in _City of Angels_ anymore. I was ready to sleep for a century. I could feel that Cas was still watching me. After a few minutes he said, "Dean?"

"Yeah?" I didn't mind playing twenty questions with him as long as I fell asleep before he hit question number three.

"Please promise me you aren't going to kill yourself."

"Aw shit, Cas. Of course I'm not gonna off myself. But I ain't running down the road singing _The Goodship Lollipop_ anytime soon." Back then, I figured it would be rare if I ever actually cracked a smile after what had happened to Sam. "Why does it bother you so much? I get that we're tight, Cas, but I thought you had an office to run up among the clouds?"

Again Cas didn't say anything for a few minutes. I'd tuned out _City of Angels_ for the most part, although at one point I swear to God that Meg Ryan referred to Nicolas Cage as beautiful. That almost made me smile.

Almost.

"I don't like it up there," Cas finally said.

"Yeah. You did mention that before. You telling me that you don't wanna fix it up and make it all heavenly and shit again?"

"No. I really don't want too."

"Why?"

"Because you're more important than it is."

That made me freeze up a little. Wasn't really sure if I'd heard him properly or not. But even with my eyes closed I could tell that Castiel was looking at me the way he sometimes did, when his eyes get all intense and bright. I never knew that eyes as dark as Cas's could ever be bright, but his got that way sometimes. Like beetles.

"I don't want to go back because I want to be around you. Sometimes it feels like I need to be around you, Dean. Like something bad is going to happen if I'm not. Judging from the fact that you were having thoughts of suicide, that possibility seems more than likely right now."

"I told you I wasn't going to kill myself, Cas."

"Good. I need you here, Dean."

I snorted. "Yeah, like Michael and all them other dicks needed me around." The second I said it I wished I could take it back. "Aw shit. I didn't mean that, Cas." I cracked my eyes open and looked over at him. Thanks to the glare coming from The Second Worst Nicolas Cage Movie Ever, I could see Cas's face clearly. He had that look, the one he'd had when he'd told the man upstairs to go fuck himself. He looked like a slapped puppy and it made me feel like shit.

"Cas..." I really didn't know what to say. And if I did say something, I'd likely make the whole thing _City of Angels_ level chick flick-y. Does that sound fucked up? Wait for it. It gets better. And I don't mean that in the ironic sense either. For once things actually did look up for yours truly.

"I don't want to be like them," Cas finally said. "I'm nothing like them, Dean. I would never do anything to cause you harm. I don't know what it will take for you to understand that."

"Nothing...you've done more than enough." He had. The hand prints on my shoulders were proof enough of that. I don't know of he believed me or not then, but he didn't say anything for a little while. I closed my eyes, knowing that he wasn't going to take off. Actually kind of made me feel safe.

After a while I was starting to hit that cozy little place between falling asleep and staying awake. Cas's voice got my attention again. He was speaking quietly; he didn't wanna wake me up I think.

"Dean...can I please stay?" I really didn't know exactly what he meant by that beyond staying in the other bed for the night. I didn't mind that at all. It felt nice knowing that I wouldn't be completely fucking alone for the rest of the night.

" 'Course," I said, half-asleep. "Be glad to have you around."

"And you won't hurt yourself?"

"Nah." I yawned. "Not as long as you stand by me," I mumbled sleepily. I heard Cas roll over onto his mattress . The TV clicked off although I don't remember either of us grabbing the remote

Just before I nodded off for good, Cas said, "Dean?"

"What?"

"Why did that blonde woman in the movie think the man with horse face was beautiful?"

"Cuz they paid her lots of money to." I fell asleep right after that.


	2. Seventeen Hours

Cas was still on the other mattress when I woke up. I don't think he fell asleep. He was just lying there with his hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling.

And yeah, right after I woke up there was like fifteen seconds when I forgot about Sam being gone and gone for good.

And it hurt like a steel-toed boot to the nutsack. But I wasn't going to let that show. Images, am I right? And Cas has seen the best and worst of me so it shouldn't have mattered whether I started ugly-crying. But again, old habits.

So I lay on my side for about a minute until I was Zen enough to pretend to yawn and stretch. Cas probably didn't buy it but he didn't say anything.

"You get any shut-eye last night?" I asked him. I got off the bed and looked at the clock in the kitchen. It was a little after eleven. I whistled. "Jesus, I Slept like a cat. Haven't done that in...when did Princess Di kick the bucket, again? Whatever. It was like around that time."

"You slept for twelve hours," Cas said. He kicked his legs over the side of the mattress. "I didn't trouble myself. I wanted to be alert in case anything snuck up, but there was no commotion aside from the prostitute in the next room slapping her client with what sounded like a bull whip some time after midnight. He either got severely hurt or had an orgasm; I couldn't tell which. And Diana Spencer died on August 7th, 1997."

I grinned. Some people might think Cas's in-your-face blunt talk is annoying but I like it.

"I'll have to remember that one the next I play _Trivial Pursuit_."

"What's that?"

"It's a board game. We'll have to play it one day."

Force of habit made me forget to close the bathroom door while I took a piss. Sam and I hadn't had any boundaries when it came to the more military shit of our lives: we pissed, burped, farted, got dressed and undressed and cussed in front of each other like it was no big deal because it wasn't, no matter how much Chuck's fangirls liked to read into it. 

Second nature for the nature boys. So it didn't really dawn on me until I had my briefs down past my knees as I made for the shower that the person in the other room _wasn't_ Sam.

I looked over my shoulder. "Jesus, Cas. Don't really go much for privacy in the Great Hereafter, huh?" Cas was staring at me with his mouth a little open. I grinned like a frat boy but made sure to keep my junk covered as I closed the bathroom door.

I was probably screwed up in the head for being so casual with the nudity around Castiel. But nothing felt any different, even though I knew it was. The hot shower still felt almost as good as sex; the cheap motel soap smelled like rubber and my morning wood was rising to the occasion.

Now, it's common knowledge throughout the United States and most parts of southern Canada that I like nothing more than shooting a load. Whether it's in a pussy or an ass, or in a mouth, or just through someone's fingers, getting off turns me the fuck on. My switch is always flipped; it's the one escape I have from everything.

But that morning, even though General Sherman was in the process of pointing due North, I just wasn't in the mood. It was weird, and the it being weird made me remember what it was that was missing--the Yin to my Yang; the peanut butter to my jelly. Sam was gone and gone for good. He was so far out of anything's reach that he might as well not have existed in the first place.

I've felt pain in my life on the physical level that would give Albert Fish waking nightmares. Being in Hell as long as I was fucked me up big time. Nothing compares to it, to borrow a quote from Sinead O'Connor. And when I remembered what had happened to my little brother, what I couldn't do for him, I felt a bit of that pain again.  
  
And then I felt a lot of it. Well, not really felt. More like I could see it coming--like I was on a set of train tracks and that feeling was coming at me seventy miles an hour.

I grilled the shower knob a little too tightly as I killed the water. Falling to pieces wasn't in my vocabulary. And it wouldn't do dick for what happened.

I walked out of the bathroom still dripping wet, one of the towels thrown over my shoulder. Then I just about fell flat on my face when I noticed that Cas was still sitting on the edge of the other Queen size.

"Cas--what the fuck, man?" I wrapped the towel around my waist as fast as I could.

"You said I could stay."

"Yeah but not stalk!"

Cas shrugged. "I'm sorry, Dean. But ninety-five per cent of household accidents take place in the bathroom. I wanted to be here in case you fell over or—

"Or if I got acquainted with a razor blade, right?" My face was a little pink. My face. The face of the dude who once jerked off buck naked in front of three girls and two dudes on a dare. (For the record they offered me two hundred bucks to do it; we were tight on cash and I actually had a good damn time during, so fuck off.)

"You're embarrassed?" Cas cocked his head to the side as I tugged a clean pair of briefs on under my towel.

"I'm not in the habit of walking around with my junk flopping out in front of other guys, Cas." At least I hadn't been since the aforementioned bet.

"You didn't seem to mind before the shower." Cas looked almost annoyed.

I rolled my eyes. "That was just a peepshow, Cas. You want the full monty you have to pay up." The banter was easy. It filled what could have been silence. I wondered how I ever thought I could have made it through last night if it hadn't been for my angel. Then I remembered that I'd seriously been thinking about putting a bullet between my eyes before Castiel had shown up.

I pulled a clean shirt on. I didn't want to feel that way. Suicide was for pussies; I was hurting and I probably would hurt. After everything I'd been through I had a right to hurt. I could handle it but I realized I couldn't handle it completely alone.

I pulled my duffle out from under the bed. "Hey Cas?"

"Yes Dean?"

"Were you serious last night? When you said you wanted to stick around for a while?" _Keep the voice under control, Deano. Don't let the heavenly messenger see that you're too chickenshit to trust flying stag with your own thoughts right at the moment._

"Yes. Would you like me to stay?"

I stood up and flung my duffle over my shoulder. Cas was staring up at me and he looked different. Nothing physical had changed about him since he'd been put back together, but there was something a little more human in his eyes. I wanted to just leave it at a simple "yes." Hell, even a stoic "yeah," would have been less of a dick thing to do. But because I was still conscious of that train of thoughts and emotions coming towards me, I needed to pretend, needed to hide behind the mask that my old man had taught me to wear growing up.

I shrugged, like not being alone after losing Sam and Adam was no big deal even though it could have put Godzilla to shame. "Whatever. It's your eternity. But I've got one rule."

Castiel stood up and for a second it looked like he was smiling. "What rule is that, Dean?"

"Okay, make that two rules. First of all, don't go getting all gushy like that. Second rule is that driver picks the music, shotgun shuts his cakehole."

I waited for Cas to call me a jerk.

But he didn't because he wasn't Sam.


	3. Twenty-four Hours

After nearly thirty years of living on the road, all the interstates start to look the same. Well, except for the ones that go through parts of the country that don't look like Nature's taint.

If there was one thing I could say about Cas it was that he was a man (angel?) of few words. The only time he ever really spoke during that first day of driving towards nothing was when he predictably had a question.

"Dean, why does that billboard show a woman holding a shaving razor to a banzai shrub?"

" 'Cause advertising agencies are turning into porn, my man."

"Dean, what was the meaning of that song we just listened to?"

" _Pearl Necklace_? Well, think about all the white things that a chick could end up with on her neck that isn't jewelry."

"I don't...oh."

"What?"

"Nothing."

"No, I'm serious. What conclusion did you come to, featherbrain?"

"...semen."

"Right on."

It was actually kind of amusing. I'd never found Castiel annoying, something I can't say for anyone else I'd ever met. His curiosity for everything in the world reminded me of another time when a tiny little brown haired moose wouldn't shut the fuck up.

"Dean, why don't people just float away into the sky?"

" 'Cause of gravity, Sammy."

"Dean, why are some flowers different colors than others?"

" 'Cause they wanna be, Sammy."

"Dean, why does Dad always go away for such a long time?"

" 'Cause he's working, Sammy."

"Dean, what happened to Mom?"

"Stop asking questions, Sammy."

"Dean, why doesn't Dad love me?"

He'd been six when he asked me that. My little ten-year-old heart had done something like breaking. As if I'd known what it meant to actually have a broken heart at that age. Remembering it as Cas and I flew down the ribbon of highway towards the bright blue sky-way made my knuckles go white on the steering wheel.

I turned the radio up. I needed to distract myself from my thoughts. I'd dealt with the pain already. No point in focusing on it when I knew my brother wasn't coming back.

Except that I couldn't stop thinking about it. I kept seeing Sam through every point of his life. It was the most fucked up family film: running out of a burning house with him in my arms; watching him grow up and having to lie to him; seeing him have the balls to stand up to our jerkass of an old man; watching him hit the road and not look back; finding him and losing him again and again and again...

I grunted something, I can't remember what. Cas looked over at me with that same curiosity that he'd had before opening his yap to ask some stupid question. I shook my head, against what I didn't have a fucking Scooby. I didn't want Cas asking because there was nothing wrong except me acting like a pussy because I couldn't get a grip on my own thoughts...couldn't get a grip on the sensation in my chest, the tightening feeling that made it harder to breathe, harder to focus on anything other than Sam.

No. Not just Sam.

The absence of him. The lack of him burying his nose in a book or road map in the shotgun side; the lack of him nodding off or else keeping me awake and alert by talking about nothing and everything at the same time. Sam was gone, gone for good; he wasn't coming back to talk to me or bitch me out, not ever again...

Baby jerked to the shoulder of the highway. The wheels hit a rut in the road. I needed to focus to stop from wrapping my angel and I around a guardrail, but I didn't want to put the energy into it.

I wondered if it had hurt. I wondered what he'd felt when he'd stopped trying to beat the shit out of me. I wondered if he was even there in that cage made of flesh and blood and bone and nightmare. He hadn't been Sam--my Sam--even when he'd made to jump into The Pit. He was gone, gone, _gone_.

My foot slammed on the brake. Because I was taking a breather, that was it. Not because the images got to be too much, not because I felt like something had reached through my neck and was squeezing my throat with a strong, clawed hand. My head hit the steering wheel. _Crimson and Clover_ was on the radio--the Joan Jett version. My shoulders were shaking and a weird noise was filling the front seat of Baby.

I didn't know that I was making that noise until I felt a big, warm, hand on my shoulder. I didn't know that I was crying and making those choking sounds until I looked over and saw Castiel staring at me with his fingers curled around my shoulder in the same place he'd gripped me when he'd saved me from Hell.

I was crying. My eyes burned from the tears; snot was running down my nose. Hey, I might do a lot of things prettier than most but I'm only human--when I really cry, I cry ugly.

Through it all, Cas never lifted his hand off of me. I could hear him beneath my pathetic, wounded-animal noises: he was talking to me quietly, those big blue eyes like a spotlight keeping me in the moment, stopping any attempt I had at trying to brush the emotional tornado off. "It’s okay, Dean. It’s okay…"

In the past when Cas had tried to make a human connection, it'd come off as kind of socially retarded. But even through one of the biggest chick flick moments that the American Interior had ever seen, I knew that my angel wasn't telling me that it was okay that Sam was farther off the dead--he was telling me that it was okay that I had gone to pieces like a broken Ming dynasty vase.

There was nobody out on the darkening highway but us.

Cas had never ever judged a person for what they felt. Not even Dean of House Winchester, First of His Name, Father of the Frat-boy type, Killer of Demons, King of the Stoics, Wiseasses and BAMFs.

I'd like to say that that was a turning point in the emotional spectrum of me. I'd like to say that everything went all _Bridges of Madison County_ after; that Cas and I spent the rest of our destination-less drive openly discussing our feelings and listening to Jewel and Ani DiFranco on the radio.

But that didn't come until a little bit later. The talking part. I would never listen to fucking Ani DiFranco.

It took longer than I care to admit for me to calm down. Cas didn't move his hand from my shoulder right away. And yeah, even then I'll admit that it felt nice because I knew I wasn't entirely alone, but it was still in a platonic way and, like I said, I'll be getting to that little fork in the road eventually, so fuck off.

I sat up straight; Cas took his hand off my shoulder and opened the glove compartment. A packet of Kleenex was shoved under my snotty nose.

"Thanks." It sounded like I had a sinus infection.

"You're welcome, Dean."

I grinned as I wiped my eyes and nose. "Bet you never thought you'd have a front row seat to that, huh?"

Cas shook his head. "You’re allowed to have feelings, Dean," he said quietly.

I wanted to tell him that if he let spill that he'd seen me lose it like an eleven year old girl getting her period for the first time that I'd stuff a pillow with his feathers. But I wasn't in the mood to be a wiseass. Besides, I owed it to Cas to be a decent person.

"Fuck, I'm bushed." I tossed the Kleenex out the window. Hey, tissues are biodegradable. If you use them to wipe away as much jizz as I have in my life you learn which brand won't melt the Earth when you have to rub one out in the woods.

"There’s a _Hampton Inn_ fifty miles down the highway."

"What are you, a GPS?"

"I'll be whatever you need me to be, Dean."

I took a deep breath and once again held back on the smartass response. See? I was making baby steps towards being less of a dick. "That's...that's good to know, featherbrain." I put Baby in drive. _More Than Words_ was playing on the radio. When I reached over to turn it up, I saw that Castiel was smiling, a real smile that made him look a little different to me—more human.

"Something tickling you, featherbrain?"

"I like it when you call me that, Dean."

I snorted. I wanted to say "no chick flick moments," even though I'd just won that year's Oscar for them. But I wasn't in the mood.

'Sides, I kinda liked that Cas liked it.

The moon was full over the highway. The sky was clear. "Lots of stars." My voice was a whisper of something like wonder.

Cas looked out the windshield. "They shine even though they're far away and supposed to be dead." He glanced at me; I smiled a little and kept on driving.

'Cause what else could I do?


	4. Seventy-Five Hours

"You've been sucking on that for a while, featherbrain."

"It tastes so good, Dean."

"Yeah, well, it ain't gonna taste good once its warm and sticky."

Cas nodded and started gulping down his extra large Coke. And if you thought he was doing anything other than that, you really need to get your mind outta the sewers and be patient. I said I'd get to the goods and I'm nothing if not a man of my word.

We hadn't left the Hampton Inn since we'd checked the room; there'd been dick all in any kind of oogie-boogies. Then again, a town like Buttfuck, Ohio didn't exactly scream importance on the scale of targets for the bad guys. Cas and I had been keeping ourselves entertained by watching the free cable, gorging ourselves on heart attack burgers from the _In-and-Out_ down the road and playing the old game of _Trivial Pursuit: TV Edition_ we'd found in the nightstand by Cas's bed. I still think the little shit abracadabra'd it there.

Cas finished his Coke. He smiled like he'd just gotten the world's best blowjob. Then he burped, long and loud. I just about fell flat on the scratchy carpet from laughing so hard.

"Jesus!" My eyes were watering. The best part was that my angel had turned as pink as a Georgia peach. "Forget the angel powers. A good one of those would knock a demon on its ass."

"I'm sorry." Cas looked embarrassed, his eyes darting around the room. "I didn't...I couldn't stop it."

I shook my head and rolled the dice. "Don't sweat it, Cas. It's good to let the air out of your tires." It was fifty shades of fucked up that I felt so damn comfortable playing an outdated board game and gorging myself on triple decker cheeseburgers with him. But not as fucked up as the fact that I just made a reference to that piece of shit book and somewhat more superior movie.

Truth was, in the day and a bit that we'd been in the motel, Cas had been a hell of a lot more relaxed. He actually smiled once or twice. And when I'd stormed around the room complaining after finding a used condom in the bathroom garbage bin, he'd actually made a sound that was kind of like a laugh. I liked that he was being more human around me, I guess. It filled the empty space in my chest--made it easier for me to ignore that invisible feeling that there was something constantly wrong in my immediate environment.

"Okay," I said. My little plastic bit had landed on the "90's TV" space. I picked up a card. "Supporting main character from _Baywatch_."

Castiel stared at me like I'd asked him a complicated trigonometry equation. I knew that he knew the answer because I'd pulled the card when we'd played the day before. After a second of thinking he said, "Uh...Yasmine?"

"That's my man," I said with a proud smirk. "And for personal bonus points, who was the hotter between Yasmine and Pamela?"

"Yasmine," Castiel said without a pause.

"Good job, grasshoppa. I have taught you well. And why is she hotter?"

"Because she didn’t have sexual intercourse with the drummer from Motley Crue on camera." Castiel paused. "And her breasts are real."

"That's my man." I toasted Castiel with the remains of my root beer. He smiled again. He'd been doing that a lot, like I said. And I'd found myself doing everything to make him smile: teasing him for his tie always being crooked, making like I wanted to set him up with the waitress at the _Denny's_ attached to the motel, or just making a funny.

I liked seeing him be human.

He yawned, and then frowned. "I think I may be tired, Dean."

I snorted. "Not used to it, huh?"

Cas shook his head. "Sleep is something I’ve only started to feel now that I am with you."

"Aw fiddle dee dee, Cas." I batted my eyelashes and out on my best Vivian Leigh voice. "That is just the sweetest ole thing I ever did hear."

 Cas looked at me with deadness in his eyes. “Is that another film reference?”

 “Sure is. We can add that on our list of shit to do on this road trip.”

“It’s a road trip now?” Cas cocked his head to the side. Like a kitten that had just batted a ball of cotton around for the first time.

I didn’t really know what it was. It felt good to keep driving, even if I didn’t have a destination in mind. “The way I see it, someone’s going to need our help after a while. Just have to wait for the first hot-spot to show up on this little grand tour of the American interior.”

Cas looked down at the top of the _Trivial Pursuit_ game. For the first time since he’d decided to jump in the line and join me in the Great American Demon Hunt, he looked sad. I didn’t like Sad Cas; Cas was supposed to be curious like a puppy. He was supposed to laugh because one of us needed to.

“Hey.” I set my nearly-empty extra large soda down. “What’s up?”

“I won’t be as good as Sam.”

Someone was arguing in the suite above ours. That was the only sound in the room for a long time. And while the two women argued about so-and-so sleeping with whoever, I tried to swallow back the frog that had hopped into my throat. One, because Cas looked like I’d just walked up to him and shot him in the stomach, and two, because I’d realized that I hadn’t thought about Sam since Cas and I had checked into the motel.

Some rapid fire thinking went on in my brain. At one point there was a serious misfire and I ended up wondering whether angels dreamed of electric humans.

“You’re gonna be great, Cas.” He still didn’t look at me. I hated that. I wanted him to feel better because he was the only light in the bottomless depression I’d fallen into. “You’re an angel, for Christ’s sake. You can heal people; you’ve got that nasty habit of just popping up behind someone when they don’t expect it…”

“I can’t fight.” I’d seen my angel at some pretty low points. When he looked into my eyes after he spoke, he looked like he’d been watching an in-depth documentary of my life in Feel-o-Vision--like he was seeing everything I worked so damn hard to brush under the rug. That made me more terrified than anything I’d ever had to deal with. Okay, except being torture-fucked by Alastair, but my therapy sessions have told me not to dwell on those things so I ain’t going there.

I wanted to do something to make Cas feel better, which was strange because all the times that Sam had started to lose it, I just wanted to make him stop.

“I’m not a hunter, Dean. I don’t know how to use a gun. I can’t fight the way you and Sam and Bobby did.”

“You used heavenly napalm on Michael,” I said. “That takes some seriously coconut sized cojones, featherbrain.”

“It was a lucky break, Dean. I had the upper hand—

“Okay.” I raised my hands. Anything to make him stop. “Okay, so we’ll work with that then. You be the element of surprise. And I’ll…I’ll teach you how to be a better fighter.” But there wasn’t a Winchester’s chance in staying dead and buried for good that I was going to go the same route that my old man had gone in training me and Sam.

Cas didn’t look like he believed a lick of what I was saying.

After a moment that was a bit too drawn out for my liking, he got to his feet. “I’m going to go to sleep now.” It sounded like he’d swallowed sandpaper. “You don’t have to keep the lights on if you don’t want.”

The shit that I’ve been through has likely given me some form of a mental illness. At the very least I’ve had to deal with some serious PTSD, especially after being sprung from Hell. So it didn’t really surprise me that I went from feeling something sorta sympathetic to a little bit hawked off that Cas was avoiding the issue of his inferiority complex.

Pretty shitty of me, huh? Me. The guy who was using an angel’s emotional stability as a way of avoiding the grieving process. Well…that among all the other things I’m famous for avoiding in life.

I wanted to say something, but couldn’t find the words. Cas walked like an android to the bed across from mine. Then, like he’d been doing since the night he’d shown up when I was planning to off myself, he lay down on the bed. Right on top of the covers. In his trench coat. Stiff as a board, like he was an old B-movie vampire.

“Uh…Cas?”

“What?”

“Are you glued to those threads or something?”

It was like I could hear him thinking over what I’d said. He got up after ten seconds and shrugged his trench coat off. He nearly lost a finger trying to undo his tie, and I almost wanted to get up and help him with it. But somehow I’d started sweating epoxy out of my ass cheeks and couldn’t move from the floor.

Cas’s vessel had been wearing plain white boxers when he’d been consumed. That’s what he was left in when he finally flopped down on the bed. One thing I can say about my angel among the many things I can say about him is that he always sleeps like a baby. He’s got billions of years of catching up to do, so I figure he’s making up for lost time.

I cleaned up all the shit on the carpet. The arguing people above us had stopped fighting, thank whatever angel was leading the Occupy Heaven movement. I shut all the lights down, and then stripped outta my own clothes and crawled into bed.

I’ve never been able to fall asleep unless I can hear someone else breathing across from me. It’s batshit nuts, but I grew up that way—it’s like a security blanket to me. I’d lucked out in Cas riding shotgun with me on the hunt. Unlike him, I can’t just roll my head slightly to the left and end up in Dreamland.

Especially when I end up with thoughts of my dead brother on my mind.

I’d forgotten about him.

And that freaked me out. What would happen if I’d forgotten about Sam? It was bad enough that he was beyond the reach of anything—worse than dead, really. The people that we’d saved…well, we were just faces to them. Faces that they forget if they were lucky enough to afford an open-minded therapist. Bobby knew him, yeah. But Bobby had his own life. If I forgot about him that would mean that it would be like he hadn’t even existed at all.

I wrestled with that thought for too long. The motel room got real dark. My covers ended up a mess around my legs from how much I was tossing and turning. The pillows started getting to warm; I fucking hate it when the pillows get warm on both sides because then they’re just mocking you. The things that are supposed to be comfortable are suddenly the most uncomfortable fucking thing in the world. At that point sleep goes out the window, especially if you’ve got three decades of fuckupedness weighing on your mind. It’s just about impossible to enter sandman, gently snoring Castiel in the next bed or not.

Unless, of course, you happen to have my libido.

I said it before and I’ll say it again: busting a nut is my favorite thing after apple pie. And it works better than Ambien—at least for me—when it comes to nodding off.

Now, growing up Sam and I didn’t think squat of taking Mister Right for a field trip to the sausage factory in the same room. And yeah, even in the same bed a couple of times. When you’re a guy—especially when puberty has its claws dug into everything about your body and brain—shooting a wad becomes of vital importance no matter where you are or who you’re with. Unless you grew up under the thumb of religion, which is very common and also really shitty.

I wasn’t really thinking of the breathing in the room coming from someone who wasn’t used to that, though.

So I didn’t waste a second in sticking my hand down my boxers and playing with my goods until I had a pretty decent semi going. The usual images of Japanese girls with big tits didn’t flood my brain—I was thinking less on the “God I wanna fantasize” spectrum of jerking off and more on the “There’s too much jizz in my balls and I need to get it out so I can sleep” side of things.

My movements were automatic once my dick reached full, titanium hardness—it was like a ballet really: pull the skin up over the head, retract down until it sets off those little sparks in my brain’s jumper cables; repeat. Add in some nut tugging for good effect, and boom goes the dynamite.

I was above the covers, my boxers at my ankles, staring down at my piss slit and watching precum dripping onto my abs. My fuse was burning down to what would no doubt be a pretty mind blowing explosion. Hell, I was fully prepped to angle my back and leaking boner just right, stick my tongue out and get a hot load in my own mouth. I could almost feel the cum leaving my balls, speeding up the highway of my eight-incher for a fast exit at the freeway…

For some reason my ears chose that moment to tell my brain through the fog of the oncoming orgasm that something had changed in my immediate environment.

Cas wasn’t snoring quietly anymore. Through the sound of my heart beating through my balls, I could hear him breathing fast and hard, like he’d just run a marathon.

Hand still gripped around the base of my cock, I turned my head to the side.

Two dark blue eyes were gleaming at me from across the three-foot space that separated our beds.

Those eyes did something weird to me. They made me want to keep going, to keep beating off and do my magic trick of shooting onto my tongue. There was a moment of about six seconds when the idea of Cas seeing me cumming all over myself turned me on so much that I just about busted my nut right then and there.

But then thirty years of conditioning towards the boundaries of the man-code caught up to me. I let go of my cock, grabbed the sheets and yanked them up over my body. My nuts felt like rocks, but there was no way I could muster up the energy to do more than just roll over and lay there while my orgasm fell from the mind-shattering pedestal to the more pathetic level of cum dribbling out of my slit in sad spurts and globs. My lungs tightened; the back of my head burned; I knew Cas was still watching me.

And when I fell asleep, I wasn’t thinking about Sam and being afraid of forgetting him.

I was thinking about why, even though I’d rolled away and feigned annoyed disgust, Cas watching me silently shoot off was something I actually liked.


	5. One Hundred and Eighty-Six Hours

Remember when I said that I felt like I was standing on set of train tracks with a steam engine coming towards me? That had been a result of Sam being thrown into The Cage. Add to the mix an intense feeling of not knowing whether or not you’d actually liked it when a distinctly male angel had watched you bust a nut, and the train is basically loaded with C4 and lit beeswax candles.

To his credit, Cas hadn’t said anything about that night. But five days of driving down the interstate with him sitting next to me pretending to be ignorant had started to steam my clams.

He had to be thinking about it, because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And if I couldn’t stop thinking about it then nobody could. Hell, I’d blown off some seriously kinky shit as just another chapter in my big book of horny adventures. Wearing panties, jacking off in front of other people, streaking, public sex, threesomes…it was all stuff I could just get over. But not Cas seeing me that night in the Hampton Inn.

I kept looking at him like he was a bomb waiting to go off. But he never said a word about it; he just kept asking regular questions about hunting and where we were going and what we were going to do next.

And me? Well, fuck no I didn’t bring it up either. But it was like those thoughts I’d had of Sam in The Cage—trying to _not_ think about what Cas was possibly _still_ thinking about only made it more persistent. It was like a rash on my nutsack.

By the grace of whatever was in the shithole of Heaven now, we ended up stumbling upon something a little out of the ordinary by the time we got to Duluth. It wasn’t exactly burying the needle in terms of bad vibes, but it still bore investigating.

Same story as usual: check into a motel using fake names; tell the receptionist that we want two queens because we’re not gay (even though we’d both shared something that was a bit bicurious), and hit the books.

I made sure to let Cas take the reigns. I’d crammed all I knew about hunting the right way down his throat during the drive from Ohio, so it only seemed like a good idea to sit back and let my angel practice researching and following through. That, and I was still preoccupied by a sudden case of gay OCD.

Case in point, the first thing I thought when Cas’s face split into a big smile when he found out what was at the bottom of the torment of a young married couple (just an angry ghost) was that he looked cute when he was happy. Then I punched that thought in the mouth. It only regrew its teeth and bit into my brain all the more when Cas started packing all the necessary shit for a salt-and-burn into one of the spare duffle bags we’d had.

“Dean?” He stared at me with his head tilted to the side. It was that little kitten look, and for a moment I thought about nick-naming him “Cat-stiel.” He’d gripped me tight and raised me from purr-dition, after all.  


See? Completely Courtney Love-levels of insane. But I had an excuse. Not only was I still dealing with the loss of my little brother(s), but I was also having a mild sexual identity crisis.

“Hm?” I cleared my throat and sat up a little straighter in my chair. Straighter being the operative word, here.

“Aren’t you coming with me?”

“Do you need me? Uh, my help?” No, my ears were not turning red.

Cas frowned. “It seems a very easy thing to do. I’ve seen you and Sam burn remains before.”

“Do you wanna do it on your own? The salt-and-burn, I mean.” Because leaving it at “do it” sounded too much like sex to me.

Cas thought for a second. “I’d like to try. If anything goes wrong I can teleport to you. Will you be here?”

I stood up. “Think I might head down to the bar for a bit. Just to unwind.” Not to try and drown my thoughts about Cas watching me cumming or Sam being tormented for eternity in a sea of Jim Beam. “I mean, if you really need me—my help…I can come. With you!” What the hell was going on with my mouth? Euphemisms were marching out in a rainbow colored Pride parade.

Instead of giving me a lecture, Cas looked even more excited to cut and run. “It shouldn’t be long,” he said.

“Need the name of the bar?”

“I’ll find you, Dean. I’ll always find you.”

It was nice, even if it sounded like the kind of thing that Snow White would say to Prince Charming.

Cas didn’t blink out of sight. He was trying to do things more and more human, even though I’d run my tongue dry in telling him that he didn’t need to. But I liked that he was trying to be on equal footing with me.

I stayed in the front seat, waiting until Cas had turned the corner at the end of the block. Like he was a sixteen-year old girl going to the prom with a local ruffian, and I was the concerned father waiting with my shotgun. It wouldn’t be dangerous. It was just a salt-and-burn.

But I couldn’t stop worrying all the time I drove to the bar. I couldn’t stop worrying that something would go wrong. Maybe the ghost was a special ghost? Maybe Cas trying to hunt would bring down the forces of the afterlife? He’d get thrown into the Pit, and end up tortured and lost and not by me in the shotgun side anymore. Just like Sam and Adam.

The bartender thought it was funny when I asked if they had a Xanax cocktail. Asshole. He didn’t know what kind of fucked-up Freudian shit I was dealing with here. So I had to settle for one twenty-ounce of Coors. And then another. And then another. Then, when the pretty redhead next to me offered to buy me a Jim Beam, I had that too. I didn’t wanna hurt her feelings. She just wanted to help me drown that little shitty devil in my brain.

And it worked.

I couldn’t remember dick shit, or shit about dicks. I couldn’t remember that Sam was gone, or even who he was really. Ironic, given that that’s what I’d been most afraid of doing.

There was nothing but the numbing bliss of being completely off my ass. Everyone in the bar looked ten times prettier to me, even the three hundred pound trucker with tattoos all over his arms.

A line of shots went down; my throat burned, but goddamn it felt good. I did start to think about Cas, but the thoughts just floated by like clouds. Whenever I found him, I’d have to thank him for letting me go out and feel good. He’d made the beer and the booze, I decided. It didn’t just feel good, it felt fucking celestial!

I stood up at one point and felt my body swaying. The room was dim, there were people everywhere. Something was pounding out of the speakers, but I didn’t pay attention to it. It could have been a fucking Britney Spears song and I would have thrown my hands in the air and justified that woman’s existence for the rest of my life. (Just for the record, I do actually think she’s an okay chick and people should be a fuck of a lot nicer to her, thank you very much.)

There was a noise behind me. It was a word. What were words again? Word was a funny word. It sounded like someone from Philly trying to say “wood.” I’d had wood a few nights ago when Castiel had seen me beating off.

Castiel.

He was standing behind me. He was saying my name. That was the word I’d heard. My name was me, and Cas was saying it and it was good.

But if it was good, why didn’t he look happy?

I smiled and just about fell into him. He smelled good—like the woods after a rain storm. “Dean? You’re drunk.”

“And you,” I said, breathing into the lapel of his trench coat, “are an angel!”

Cas didn’t push my away. He put his hands on my shoulders and held me out at arms length, but he still didn’t make any move that he didn’t like me being close to him.

That was a good thing.

“I dealt with the remains.” Cas still didn’t look happy. He needed a drink because drinks made things good.

“Good for you!” I was yelling, even though the bar wasn’t that noisy. “Let’s drink to that. Hey, bartender! A pornstar for my man here. Better make it Peter North; he’s classy like that.”

“Dean!”

There was something about the way he was talking. Like he was annoyed but worried and couldn’t wait for me to start making sense again. I tried to see him clearly through the fuzz in my brain. He had dark hair. Sam had had dark hair too. Sam had looked at me like that in the year leading up to my vacation in Hell.

The year that I’d set the wheels into motion for what would be Sam’s never-ending stay in The Cage. Sam had died too many times; he’d been hurt too many times because I was a failure at everything I was: an older brother, a hunter, a human being.

At that moment I heard the whistle of that speeding train in my mind. I saw its light, and decided to just run into it because it was easier than having to try and outrun it.

My fists clenched at my sides. I wanted to hit everything in the bar, to make the rest of the world feel as bad as I was feeling.

Cas didn’t give me that chance though. His fingers tightened around my shoulders. Everything went really fucking spinny for a moment and then it was dark and quiet.

We were back in the motel room.

I tripped over my own feet and fell onto my bed. I thought I was going to upchuck then, but I held it back. This wasn’t my first time at the rodeo and given the track of my thoughts, it probably wouldn’t be the last.

“This bed feels so good.” I’m pretty sure I was slurring. “It’s like a hug for my face.”

I heard the mattress across from me creak as Castiel sat down. I rolled over, cracked my eyelids open. He was watching me with those big blue eyes. Eyes like the ocean.

I sat up, ignoring the feeling of my brain sloshing around in my scalp. “Cas,” I said, trying to be serious, “why didn’t you let me drown?”

“I don’t understand you, Dean.”

“I was trying to drown. Why didn’t you let me?” More importantly, why didn’t he tell that I could have just jumped into his eyes and drowned all my problems?

The ugly red clock on the popcorn wall was ticking, drilling into the grey matter of my brain like a construction crew. “You were going to hurt yourself,” Cas said finally. “You haven’t eaten anything since lunch. Drinking like that…you would have vomited all over the bar and then had to go to the hospital.”

“No!” Why wasn’t he listening to me? I shuffled forward so that my ass was on the edge of the mattress. There wasn’t room for air to pass between me and my angel. It seemed like a good idea, at the time anyway, to take his face in my hands, so I did. He wasn’t going to get the message if I didn’t point it out to him. “These, man! Your eyes. They’re like a lake or something. They’re making me feel better already.”

Cas tried to look away.

“Don’t do that!” Even to me my voice sounded way too whiny. Castiel sighed and made himself look into my eyes. Already I felt like I’d just been informed by the NSA that I was going to have the entire National Guard following me everywhere to make sure that nothing hurt me. “That! How are you doing that, Cas? With your eyes…” I brushed my thumb at the spot under his eye. “Is that the angel mojo?”

“No…” Cas’s voice was a ragged whisper. He closed his eyes, but I still felt that weird security.

“Then what…what are you doing to me, huh featherbrain?” How was he making me feel so safe?

Watching his face in the near-darkness of the motel room, I remembered that he’d saved me from an eternity of torture and pain. Even if it had turned out to be part of some grand scheme on the part of Heaven, he’d still saved me.

“Cas…” I was the one whispering now. He tried to duck his head, but I wouldn’t let him. I didn’t want him to leave, to lose that feeling of being wrapped in a warm, fuzzy blanket. All the embarrassment and confusion I’d felt since the night he’d seen me masturbating was gone. The memory of it made my face burn, but not in a bad way. My heart was beating fast and my lungs were tightening, making me breathe faster. I swore that I could feel the hand marks--his hand marks--on my shoulders prickling with a really, really nice electrical current. “Why are you always so nice to me, huh? All the things you’ve done…saving me, being here…why?”

“Dean, don’t…” He sounded scared. I didn’t want him to be scared because he was too damn wonderful—too fucking _heavenly_ to ever be frightened.

I remembered what had happened when I’d told Cassie about the darkness in the world around her. She’d looked and sounded scared. Just the way that Cas looked and sounded in front of me in the motel room. I’d done something to make her feel better, to make her not afraid anymore because I couldn’t stand the thought of someone I felt so strongly about being afraid.

The line between reality and memory didn’t blur when I closed the space between me and my angel and kissed him. I knew it was Cas, beyond a shadow of doubt. Curious, compassionate, courageous Castiel. It didn’t matter to me that he was a dude; he was upset and I wanted to make it better because my eyes couldn’t make him feel safe the way his did for me.

A shiver went up Cas’s spine. My hands went from his face to his shoulders; I was afraid he was going to bolt for the door or teleport away. I didn’t want him too. I wanted him to stay there and let me make him feel better.

His lips parted. I think it was because he was surprised. But in my state of happy intoxication, I just took it as an invitation. Warm breath sucked me in, and I brushed my tongue against his; he tasted like saliva and the grape juice he’d been drinking before he left for the salt-and-burn. I felt him go tense when my tongue touched his, and for a second there was only me, moving in his mouth, tasting what I realized was pure and total angel.

Then, carefully, as if he was afraid that I’d be the one to run away, his tongue moved against mine.

I was the one who shivered then. I was the one who threw my weight against him and pushed him down to the mattress. He groaned in my mouth, and I groaned right back when I felt the hardness of his boner pressing against my leg. I’d never given much thought to how good it would feel to have another guy’s stiffie against me—I mean, I knew how good my own hard cock felt to me, and to women. But the thought that it was _me_ making Castiel plump up to rock-hardness was like a bungee jump—thrilling because I thought of what could happen if something went wrong, but also so damn good because it was what I wanted to do.

We broke apart. Not because I’d suddenly remembered my own heterosexuality. I was still pretty blasted from all the booze, after all. We broke apart because, as good as it felt to be playing a game of tongue tag with Cas, we both needed to breathe.

Weird.

When we finally unglued our lips from each other, breathing seemed to be like the last thing in the world either of us could actually accomplish.

His eyes were wide. His lips were raw and plump red, like strawberries.

I smiled at him, feeling sleep starting to lead me by the hand across the crosswalk towards the School of Passing Out. “Cas,” I whispered. Then my head was on his chest. “My angel…my Castiel.”

I fell asleep like that. But not before I heard Cas saying my name over and over again like it was a fucking prayer. And not before I felt the hard weight of his arm wrap around me and pull me close.  



	6. Two Hundred and Forty Hours

This is probably going to disappoint a lot of people, but I freaked out when I woke up in that motel room. It was a good goddamn thing that Cas wasn’t actually there because I probably would have started whaling on him. Might have even told him to hit the heavenly bricks.

Life lesson: just because making out with someone who means something to you when you’re drunk feels better than a lot of things you’ve felt in several…years, doesn’t result in champagne and roses. This is true for anyone, no matter what side of the seesaw they sit on. If you’re straight and you make out with a girl who’s always been a friend, chances are you’ll feel like shit. If you’re a guy who makes out with a guy who’s a friend, chances are you’ll feel even shittier. If you’re two girls who make out with each other and you’re friends, write about it to _Penthouse Forum_ and make some money off of it.

If you’re me and you make out with an angel who has saved your ass over many, many occasions, you’ll feel like a shit monster with the mother of all hangovers to boot.

I didn’t lose it on Cas, but I lost it on an ugly, fake, potted plant on my bedside table. And the alarm clock. And the microwave. It looked like Motley Crue had taken some ecstasy and then assaulted everything in the room that would cost the least to replace.

By the time Cas showed up with breakfast from the diner down the street, I had our shit packed and ready to go.

I waited for him to say something about what had happened, but he didn’t. And that kinda cheesed me off, but I didn’t let it show. He’d been kind enough to bring me the greasiest breakfast sandwich off the menu, and a thing of extra strength Tylenol; I didn’t want to look like any more of an ass-butt than I already was.

It took three days to drive from Duluth to Montana because I kept stopping Baby at nearly every gas station just so I could get out of the car and have some breathing room. Being near Castiel after what I’d done was like sitting in a car with a live anaconda. I kept waiting for something to happen, waiting for him to ask me why.

But that son of a bitch just sat there in silence the entire time. He stared out the window, letting the slipstream blow through his hair when it was nice, or else nodding off against the glass when he hit a patch of rain outside of Williston.

I was angry at him, but it wasn’t fair to be angry at him because he hadn’t done anything. The imp in my mind tried to tell me that Cas should have been the one to push me off, but I’d always hated victim blaming with every fibee of my being; I killed that thought dead the first time it crossed my mind and it never came back.

The only thing that ever came back was that it had felt good to kiss him, even being as drunk as I had been. I kept going in circles with my own thoughts, it was starting to get really fucking exhausting. Sleep didn’t help much because I kept having to tell myself that it was Cas breathing on the bed next to me, not Sam. Because if I let myself think it was Sam, I’d get overwhelmed again and look for the outlet of jerking my cock. There was no way I was going to risk going to the territory of it feeling good to have Cas watching me do that again.

I had the temper of a grizzly bear with a testicular hernia by the time we got to Great Falls. We ended up at another pokey little motel—the folks at the franchise chain hadn’t exactly been happy that I’d left the suite looking like it had been the scene of an Ike and Tina Turner fight, and we'd been banned for life.

I pulled into the parking lot at nearly eleven at night and slammed the door a little too hard.

Cas flinched in the passenger seat and when he got out, I let a little bit of my frustration (read: probably mood disorder) slip out. “Would you grow a pair? It was just the door closing.”

Again with the slapped puppy look.

“Aw for fuck sake, Cas.” I marched away from Baby, my duffle held in a white-knuckle grip. Hurricane Katrina was brewing in my mind. The part of me that was undeniably me and not the product of three decades of trauma was standing in the middle of the storm with a broken umbrella and a blank look. “Get your lips off the floor, man.”

“I’m sorry, Dean.”

“Whatever.”

 _What are you doing_! Normal Dean screamed as the hurricane moved in. But Not Normal Dean was riding the high of being a little piss-ant.

I threw my shit on the floor, Cas watching me from the doorway. I started to get aggravated, not only because he was staring at me and had every right to be confused, but also because I knew that the way I was feeling was wrong.

But I couldn’t help it.

“What!” I glared at him. _His eyes_ , Normal Dean said; the poor little guy was hanging onto a telephone pole as Hurricane Shitstorm raged all around him. _Look into his eyes, you insensitive fuck!_

“Did I do something wrong?” Cas sounded so vulnerable. I made a move to cross the room and pull him into a hug that would probably squeeze the immortal life from him, but Motherfucking Prick Bastard Cockblasting Son of a Bitch Dean was having none of it.

“Something wrong?” I laughed even though nothing was funny. “Yeah. You did do something wrong. You keep acting like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like…like that!” _Being stupid._ Normal Dean was up to his eyeballs in flood water, but he wasn’t going down without a fight. _You are being stupid and you know it_.

Cas lowered his head. “Was it…was it because you kissed me?”

At that point, I wanted to grab him by his stupid trench coat and throw him into the wall. But even though Hurricane Dean was raging at me to do that, Normal Dean got the upper hand. He’d found a safe place on the roof of a hotel and was now shouting at me from the storm.

_Remember what happened to Sam? Remember when you called him a monster? Did it feel good when he threw you into a coffee table? Did it solve anything? Get your shit together. Or at least just get one of you out here before you fuck things up worse than you’re already doing._

Normal Dean was right. Little son of a bitch. He knew I wanted to rant and rave like a baby. I’ll never understand why babies are allowed to piss and moan and scream and nobody bats an eyelash, but when a full grown person gets it into their head to do that they’re suddenly called bipolar type two (which, to me, sounds like the name of a shitty brand of shoes.)

I balled up my fists. I did it to calm myself down. But Cas saw, and he actually tensed. He was scared of me. And that wasn’t fair. I mean yeah, on my normal days I had a mouth on me that could stop a bull in heat, and a fuse the size of a grape seed. But I didn’t like it when innocent things were afraid of me.

I exhaled through my nose to the count of eight. Then inhaled. It was a trick I’d learned from browsing the Internet on how to control your anger without resorting to Lady Alcohol.

“Cas.” My voice, thankfully, wasn’t filled with piss and vinegar anymore. I ran my hand over my face. “Look, this is gonna sound all kinds of messed up, but I need some air. Maybe—

I was talking to ugly wallpaper. He’d gone and teleported away from me.

And, yeah, it hurt. It hurt almost as much as Alastair making me take it up the ass from something that had two dicks, (yeah, that’s kinda the theme of Hell. And those little wren’s among you who get off on it are sick for thinking its anything but intensely disturbing) but not as much because nothing hurts like that.

I looked at my reflection in the little ugly decorative mirror over the bookshelf. “Nice job, ass-wipe.”

Distraction was my best friend during those points after losing Sam and finding whatever it was that I’d found with Cas. I unpacked my duffle and his. Then re-organized them. Then unpacked them again and then just gave up. No matter what I did, the persistent reminder of just about everything was there. Sam; Cas; the fact that I’d nearly blown a back tire on the I-94.

The worst part of it was that I didn’t have Cas’s calm quiet there to bring me back down to one. Or his blue eyes to make me feel safe.

Scratch that—the worst part was that _I_ was the reason he wasn’t there.

The weirdest thing about it was that I didn’t go to pieces or think about the fact that Cas might never come back. I mean, the thought did cross my mind, but then it left just as fast for parts unknown. I knew without really knowing how that Cas wasn’t going to stay away—he would come back when we were both ready for it. The only question was how long _I_ wanted to wait until _I_ was ready.

It took me all of two minutes to come to the conclusion that I probably wouldn’t be ready to deal with what happened to Sam in the blink of an eye. Those wounds were only just starting to not-bleed.

The more pressing matter of getting the spiking levels of irritation down…that was something I could deal with. I could have spanked the monkey, probably five times until my nuts ached. I hadn’t even done anything beyond adjusting Little Dean since the night Cas had had his little peep-show. Going down the hand-reared route was tempting, but I needed more than that. I needed another person, another presence.

And I also needed to test the waters. To convince myself that I was still the same old me. The same Dean who liked to down triple-decker onion burgers while watching the shorts of a Hooter’s waitress hug her ass.

There was a newspaper in my nightstand. Lo and behold, there was a classified section. And so it came to pass that, twenty-minutes later, I was opening the motel room door for an escort.

My apologies to the women of the world, but I don’t remember her name.

She was pretty, though. Not one of the washed up old dames that caked themselves in make-up to feed a coke addiction. She was a call-girl, and I could have just as easily sat there for hours and watched an _Alien_ marathon with her and shot the shit. But that wasn’t what I wanted that night, and she seemed to know the second she laid eyes on me.

I mean, yeah, we had chit-chat for about ten minutes. And I did offer her something to drink. She took water, made herself comfortable and then tossed the long black jacket he’d been wearing into the corner. She was wearing a sexy tight black dress that stretched over naturally full breasts.

And she danced for me. She turned the radio onto a classic rock station and started giving me striptease that would have made her famous. I sat back on my bed, watching in my jeans and t-shirt. She swayed her hips, tossed her hair back and unzipped her dress. I remember her skin being smooth and perfect; I remember that she was wearing a dead-sexy Victoria Secret bra and a pair of panties with garters.

But for some reason, my dick had chosen that night to take a leave of absence.

I was stressed, I told myself. I just had to relax.

So I tried. Still, nothing. The escort smirked, but not in way where she was making fun of me. She seemed to take my lack of boner as a challenge.

She dropped to her knees and crawled across the floor to me. She ran her hands up the inside of my jeans. I looked into her eyes, conjuring up images of what she would do to me—of her reaching into my unzipped fly and feeling my bare skin (I’d chosen to fly commando that night). I pictured me buck naked as she jerked me off, fondled my balls, sucked my dick, swallowed my cum.

Nothing. No warmth pooling in the pit of my stomach. No blood rushing to my dick.

I had to hand it to her, though. She didn’t give up. She said something about me being tense, and laughed. Then she really did unzip my jeans and shuck my pants off, leaving me there naked from the waist down. She licked her lips; even the sight of my soft cock was enough to peak her interest. I remember her tossing out a line about my dick, about how big it was, about how she couldn’t wait to taste it.

All stuff that would have lit my fire weeks—hell, even days—before.

I started to hate my own dick. And when she took it in her hand and it still stayed soft as a marshmallow, I really did hate it. She tried to get it hard by playing with my nuts. She tried taking it into her mouth.

Still, nothing.

Dean Winchester’s libido had disappeared. Just like his angel had, and I knew perfectly well that those two things went hand in hand.

I was getting zero-response from down South. It was pretty much overs-ville.

She was a good sport in the end. I gave her a hundred dollar tip, and helped her zip her dress up. She said it was no big deal, that it happened to a lot of guys and that I was one of the better looking guys she'd serviced who hadn't been able to get it up. She gave me a card, told me to call her up when I finally popped wood.

The amazing thing was, I didn’t freak out after she left. I leaned against the door and laughed. I laughed for a long time. I stripped my shirt and jeans off (again) and stood under the shower for a good half an hour laughing. It was so stupid, so goddamn stupid that my package had been useless when called upon.

Even after I’d gotten back from Hell, my dick had roared back to life the second I’d seen a copy of _Busty Asian Beauties_. But now?

I got out of the shower after the water started running cold. I toweled off and killed the lights. I half-thought about just lying in bed in my birthday suit. I didn’t know when Cas would be back, but I thought that he might appreciate me sleeping bare assed.

Heat rushed to my groin at the idea.

I’d opened a bag of mental _Lays_ and I couldn’t eat just one. The mental pictures went on autopilot as I pulled my boxers over the beginnings of the hard-on that had been denied me. There wasn’t even anything sexy happening in the movie behind my eyes—it was like a wet dream. Just me, buck ass naked, and Cas being there. That was all that had been necessary to get the gears unstuck.

I lay there in the dark with my chubby tenting the sheets. I wasn’t angry. Far from it. I was curious. I was tearing through the layers of trauma for the truth. My truth. I wasn’t grossed out or afraid of being gay. I’d done anal with lots of women in my life, and as long as I was on top it didn’t really matter to me.

Besides, I’d liked the feeling of Cas’s boner rubbing into my leg that night in Duluth.

I grabbed the remote off my nightstand, sat up and ordered some porn. Fast-forwarding through ten minutes of story and character build-up (heads up: porn doesn’t need to have plot…at least the one on video) I got to the part where a fake-blonde woman was being double teamed by two dudes with dicks the size of cucumbers.

The exaggerated moaning of the woman in the scene did nothing for me. Neither did the sight of the dudes giving it to her from both ends. I made myself stare at their dicks. Nothing. I closed my eyes, and pretended that Cas was the one making the groans of satisfaction and spewing the dirty-talk.

 _Boing_! Stiff as a board.

I shut the porn off and fell back onto the pillow. I wasn’t going to beat off, even though I had a rager. Point of advice to the maybe two fellas reading this: blue balls will not kill you. Like the friend-zone, blue balls are a myth. Yeah they’re painful, but they go away. And ladies, if the men-folk in your life use blue balls as way to pressure you into having sex, remedy them with an immediate prescription of your fist applied topically to the area of complaint.

I lay there, thinking about Cas. Half-formed thoughts made of memories, of his voice and smell and eyes.

The air shifted by a fraction. The mattress beside me squeaked. Cas was back. I feigned being asleep for the amount of time it took Cas to strip off his trench coat and clothes and crawl under his own covers.

My eyes were wide open. My dick had gone soft again, thankfully.

Cars rushed by the motel on the highway outside. In those moments when the rush of traffic had stopped, I could hear crickets rubbing their legs together, singing their song of mating.

“Cas?” My voice sounded extra loud after so much silence.

“Yes Dean?”

I sifted through everything I wanted to say and put the stuff that wouldn’t spoil in a cupboard for the time being. There were still things I needed to actually think about using the head on top of my shoulders and not the one at the end of my anaconda.

But that didn’t mean that I couldn’t start tiptoeing towards the truth.

“I’m…I’m glad you’re here.”

Silence again.

Then.

“That’s good. That's really good to hear, Dean.”

I knew he was smiling, even though I couldn’t see him.


	7. Four Hundred and Thirty Hours

There’s a time and a place to test the waters. Think of that as another good piece of advice from Doctor Dean. Even though I was growing less and less freaked out by the feelings I was starting to have for Castiel, life kind of got in the way a few days after we left Montana.

Help came in the form of a California king size and a hunt for a pretty nasty little werewolf just across the border into Idaho. It took us a few days to track it down, and yeah, I got a little bit banged up into it. Luckily, Cas’s angel powers came in handy on that occasion. While he was healing me at the hotel we’d checked into, I kept watching his face.

He’d freaked out when I’d gotten hurt.

I’d had to remind him to use the silver bullet because he looked angry enough to actually kill the werewolf with his bare hands.

I’ll admit that seeing my angel get defensive of me was warming. Really, really warming. Even though I’d been in danger of bleeding out, I’d smiled all through it. I was smiling when Cas teleported us back to our rooms. It was a miracle that I could smile, given how much blood I was losing. I could barely stand up, and had to lean on Cas’s shoulder as he led me into the bathroom to treat my wounds.

“You’ll be okay.” Cas was saying it over and over again. He was trying to convince himself as much as he was trying to convince me. “You’re going to be okay Dean.” He was worried, worried for me. And when he carefully stripped my shirt off over my head and got a look at the long gouges running over my ribs, his eyes got really bright.

“Don’t cry,” I said through gritted teeth. “Not yet anyway. After you make with the angel magic.” 

Cas nodded. “Right. Of course.” _Not that I was going to cry over you, Dean_ …which was what I’d hoped he’d say. But he didn’t. His hands went over my ribs and glowed white with his grace. It tickled, like having the jet stream of a hot tub brushing into my injuries. The gashes closed, and my eyes stopped rolling into the back of my head.

Angel powers can fix a lot, but not when you’ve got a serious case of the woozies.

“Need to get up,” I mumbled. I tried, but the ugly little bathroom was starting to look a lot ugly to me. “Ugh…this place ain’t built for two huge dudes.” I giggled, leaning against the wall behind me. Hey, that little innuendo never gets old no matter how old you get.

“Here,” Cas said. “I’ll help you to the bed.”

“Aw Cas. You’re such a gentlemen. Maybe you could take me out to dinner first, though.”

I let Cas fling my arm over his shoulder.

I let him help me up.

I let myself lean against him. Even in my almost infant-like state of weakness due to blood loss, I still let myself breathe him in.

“Mmm, you smell nice, Cas,” I said. We’d left the bathroom for the motel suite, only I hadn’t remembered actually leaving. Strange. “Smell like…like a big, gooey cinnamon roll." 

Cas made a sound. It was a good sound. “Are you laughing, featherbrain?” I liked it, and wanted him to do it more.

“Yes, Dean,” he said. “I have a sense of humor. Sometimes, at least.”

My eyes were almost half closed. The room was dark. I could see a smile on Cas’s face, and I liked that even more than his laugh and the way that he smelled.

I’m not a softie physically, even though on the inside I’m as squishy as Twinkie innards and twice as sweet. In my life, I’d been thrown around more times than Tina Turner on a bad night; been shot, stabbed, tortured; physically, emotionally and sexually assaulted (again, those of you who think that’s kinky are slime) and been on the receiving end of pain of mythical proportions. I wasn’t used to people treating me with kid gloves.

So when Cas took his sweet ass time helping me sink onto the massive, plushy bed that we’d paid double usual price for, I almost wanted to cry. But just a little. No matter what video evidence there is to the contrary, it takes a lot to make me cry.

At least when I’m not in the slimy paws of depression.

“This bed feels a-fucking-mazing,” I said. Even to me, my voice sounded like it was coming from a warped 8Track tape.

“Uh, Dean…?”

“That’s my wear, don’t name it out.” I was falling into sleep-land, so making a lick of sense wasn’t really on my list of priorities.

“Are you sure you’re comfortable with me sleeping next to you?”

Yeah. The bed thing that all of Chuck’s fangirls write their smutty Harlequin shit about had finally happened. Fortunately for my legal record, Sam wasn’t the one with me. I never thought I’d feel grateful for his absence, but had it been him that I’d checked in with, one of us would have ended up sleeping in Baby.

“Why wouldn’t I be, angel cake?” I smiled with my eyes closed. Since the incident with the escort, I’d pretty much come to a contractual agreement with what I was feeling for my angel. 

Cas cleared his throat. He was all flustered; even with my eyes closed I chalked that up there with him laughing on the list of things about him, not physical, that I loved.

“I, ah, understand that, uh, it isn’t…really appropriate for two men our age to sleep in the same bed. Unless there are other circumstances…”

“Our age? Cas, you’ve got about a million years on me. That would make you a dirty old man in this situation. You telling me you’re shy about taking advantage of an innocent, young thing like me?”

I can’t really remember what sound he made. It was kinda like that back-of-the-throat grunt that a dude makes before he’s about to blow his load. But it was also like a whimper, and that definitely sent messages down the telegram line to 8 Inch, Dean’s Dick Road.

“One thing you gotta learn about this life Cas,” I said as I propped myself up on my elbows, “it’s that sometimes all you get for shut eye is sleeping nut to butt.” 

“N-nut to—

“Butt, yeah. It’s military talk. And seeing how it’s about zero dark thirty at it is, you should probably get your little angel booty under these sheets if you wanna get some sleep.”

I was a little too eager for what was going to happen. It was like I was thirteen and seeing if I could get away with masturbating to Hustler in the back of the science lab. (And yes. Also something I’m guilty—and proud—of having done.) I wanted to know what it would feel like to have the full, warm weight of Cas’s body next to mine. Even if there would be more than enough space on the California king so that we wouldn’t really be sleeping nut-to-butt (unfortunately), I still wanted to know; to see if I could handle it, if he could handle it, and if Kelly, Michelle and Beyoncé could handle it; I was definitely ready for that jelly. But only if the jelly involved Cas possibly rubbing up against me in his sleep.

It took too long for him to get out of that damn trench coat and tie and into the bed next to me.

The cutesy quip died in my throat once he was under the sheets. All that come out was a half-choked noise that sounded like I’d choked on a mouthful of wet Doritos.

“What was that, Dean?” Cas was facing away from me, his arms and legs drawn close, like he was scared that the Annabelle doll was going to drag him away if he let a limb out of the sheets or across the invisible line between us. 

“Just said that you’re really hot,” I mumbled into my pillow. My dick definitely thought the same thing; Cas’s body heat…fuck, I didn’t even need his arms or legs to be close. It was like his own personal warmth was reaching out and brushing my back.

Cas shivered, and the heat shivered too.

“Er, those are my wings, Dean.” Raspy voice. Fuck, why’d he have to go talking in that raspy voice? Didn’t he know that it was like a marionette string to my stiffie?

Slowly, I reached a hand out behind me. His wings were borderline intangible—I couldn’t feel anything but the warmth of them over the sheets. But when I ghosted my fingertips along that warmth…well, I might as well have rolled over, crossed the Mason-Dixon Line between my body and Cas’s body, curled my arm around his chest and started playing with his nipples.

Cas shivered, and instinct made me take my hand away quick as if I’d touched the open circuit of a car battery.

“Sorry, man. Did I hurt you?”

“No.” It came out as a low growl, both defensive and, dare I say, aroused? “You didn’t hurt me Dean. It, uh, it never hurts when they’re touched like that.”

I grinned in the darkness. This time I really did roll myself over, prop myself up on my elbow and stare down at Cas’s body. His bare back was facing me. I’d never given much thought to backs before; I mean, yeah, they could be hot on a woman if she was wearing the write kind of top or sexy, backless dress. But a dude’s back had always just been that to me—they were supposed to be big and broad and strong.

Never in my life had I thought of that bigness, strength and broadness as something to get my mouth watering over. I mean, obviously. I was straight A for over thirty years…I mean, there had been a small bicurious phase back towards the beginning of high school, but I dare you to find someone in Ankenny High School’s graduating class who didn’t think that Chester DeWitt didn’t have the greatest ass in the boy’s locker room.

Looking down at Cas’s bare skin just about destroyed me. I’d pretty much given the okay to how it was that I was starting to feel about him. But I hadn’t known that those feelings could cut even deeper than just “Yeah. Okay. I’m gay for my best friend.” He was strong, but small too. It was the weirdest mix of power and vulnerability. That’s what he was, really; Cas, in a nutshell, was strong but he could be broken. Sam and I had never really been like that. Sure, we cracked at the edges once in a while, but we’d had it hardwired into us that you slapped the glue on the second you started to give way.

Not Cas.

Not my angel. He had a heart that broke for the world around him. And the ones that we couldn’t see, either. Even after all the shit he’d suffered, he still tried to believe in the better of everything, tried to make things better. And not because his old man had drilled it into him; because he actually fucking cared.

My hand shook a little as reached out to brush Cas’s invisible wings. (I peg the shakes down to the blood loss, and nothing else.)

Cas let out a funny little gasp. “Dean…why are you doing that?” He was speaking like it hurt.

“ ‘Cause,” I said as my fingers brushed long back-and-forths over his wings, “it’s making you feel good.” A really, really dim white light started to glow from the bed sheets. I could see a little shadow along the pale blue, shadows of long, feathery limbs. I was seeing his wings, for real this time.

“Wh-why do you want me to feel good?”

This was the tricky part. I exhaled through my nose, still tracing the shape of Cas’s wings on the sheets. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him the truth—so close that I actually heard myself saying it in my head over and over again. ‘ _Cause that’s what people do when they really fucking care about each other, featherbrain. They do anything to make each other feel better._

But my old friend, performance anxiety, got the best of me.

“ ‘Cause you…uh, you should feel good, man.”

I wanted to slap myself, and I just about did. But rubbing Cas’s wings was making everything feel all warm and fuzzy in my tummy; slapping myself would mean not feeling that glowing warmth, ergo, I didn’t. 

I could see that his eyes were open. The light from the street outside did that thing to those blues that made them look like something precious that had been taken from the depths of the earth.

It’s funny how words just up and run when you want to use them the most. That night, though, they hadn’t—like my dick the night with the escort—taken off out of spite; they were just gone because they weren’t needed. All that was needed was me, my touch on his wings, and him; his breath getting slower and deeper as he started falling asleep, and his light, growing to a beautiful glow as he got more and more at peace.

I only lifted my hand away just before he finally drifted off. This wasn’t about sex anymore. This was about something bigger, something that felt like the universe’s most comfortable blanket tucking me in with the promise of good dreams for the rest of time. 

Slowly, I lifted my hand from Cas’s still-glowing wings. I shuffled closer, never once taking my eyes off his dark hair or the skin of his back.

Putting my arm around him was the scariest, most terrifying thing I’ve ever had to do. And if you’re reading this, chances are you know some of the shit I’ve had to cope with. If you don’t know then, I suggest you go read through all of the books Chuck has written. All of them. Every. Last. One.

For a while we just lay like that together, the warmth of Cas’s wings beneath me and the warmth of his body in front of me. My arm stayed around him, like I could protect him from everything, even though, in a pinch, his angel mojo would probably do a lot better than anything I had in Baby’s trunk.

And yeah. At the risk of being cliché, he felt so right in my arms. So fucking right.

I started to fall asleep after a while. I thought Cas was sleeping too, but just before I boarded the train to Dream City, I heard his voice.

“Dean?” 

“Mhm?” I snuggled closer. Yeah. I’m a snuggler. Even if the snuggee has a distinctly firmer body than the ones I’m used to cozying up to.

“Is this what nut to butt is?”

Okay, so maybe my boys were getting a little too close to Cas’s ass.

“You complaining?”

Just before I finally drifted off, the last thing I saw in my mind’s eye was Cas smiling as he said, “No. I like being close to you, Dean.”


	8. Five Hundred and Four Hours

We fucked each other when we woke up the next morning.

Just kidding. I'm not that kind of guy. Okay, well, maybe I am, but I can’t say I would have been completely down with it if we’d gone for the gold right away. You have to understand guys like me: we’ve gone so long doing what a majority of guys around us do that anything that challenges that idea is scarier than watching _The Grudge_ in a dark factory full of long, black wigs. It takes a lot to change, and most of us don’t—we drink our beers, watch us some football and appreciate a good pair of tits.

You know that fucking annoying Paula Cole song, “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” Well, it’s based in truth, and in my case, that was a truer truth than True Religion.

So even though Cas and I didn’t immediately start tugging each other’s nuts, I was starting to inch a little bit out of my iron closet. But if you need something to tide you over until the good stuff comes, pun completely intended, you’ll be happy to know that I woke up the day after we fell asleep together with Cas’s morning wood poking into my ass cheek.

And yeah. It felt kinda nice.

At least it did until he rolled over and out of bed. There was about a split-second of me waking up for real and then a really loud, Castiel-sized thud on the floor.

“Cas!” I rolled across the mattress to find my angel lying flat on his ass, his eyes wide and his hair all messy. He looked even more like a confused little kitty cat than ever, and I couldn’t help but laugh. I mean, yeah, I felt bad that he’d planted like that all over the ugly, Exorcist-vomit colored carpet, but the look on his face…I hesitate to use the word precious, mostly because it reminds me of something some old broad would say, but yeah. That's the word I'd go for. 

I slid off the bed, still laughing my ass off. Any anxiety I’d ever had about personal space had gone out the window days before—not that Cas had ever been much for respecting the bubble between people.

“You’re like Bambi, dude. You know that? Freaking adorable.” I was too preoccupied by my arms being under his arms and helping him to his feet to really think much about what was coming out of my mouth.

Cas didn’t say anything, to his credit. He was staring at me, the same we he always had: like he was looking right through all the bull crap scrap metal barriers I’d ever put up and into the bright eyed, bushy tailed baby giraffe that was the real Dean Winchester. I remembered hating it a few nights before—hell, I remembered how much I’d use to agonize over what it was that those stares would make me think on the best of days.

Penetrating. That’s what they were. And yeah, that word’s kinda gross and scientific and shit, but there you have it. And with him being so close to me and everything that had happened since Sam had been thrown into the Pit, I finally realized that I liked that—the way that Cas could see through all the rust and barbed wire that guarded that part of me that even I didn’t want to admit I had.

There was something happening to the air in that motel room. It was like somebody had stuck a giant, invisible vacuum in through the window. Even though I’d already helped Cas to his feet, I didn’t let go or move away. I just stood there, liking the feeling of the skin of his arm against my skin. Liking the way he was still looking into my eyes like he didn’t know what the hell was going to happen next.

So, me being me, I decided to take him there before either of us could chicken out.

I kissed him.

Weird, right? I’d been so gun-shy of it for almost a month, but when I finally let myself stop being such a pansy-ass little bitch about it, it didn’t really seem as scary. To quote my girl, Taylor Swift, “The monsters turned out to be just trees,” and before any of you start in on her, or the fact that I dig her music, just remember that the haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate.

It was a quick kiss, almost like the one I’d give my grandmother if I’d ever met her. Really over before it started. I broke away like I’d gotten an electric shock. Cas looked like I’d just started dancing “The Hustle.” I’d never seen him so damn stunned before.

“Hm.” Yeah. All this build up and after kissing him while sober and all I could manage was a caveman grunt. Fortunately for everyone involved—you gorgeous popsicles included—I wasn’t really happy to walk away from the cereal aisle after getting just a taste of the Sugar Crisp. 

Remember what I said about there being no air between us? Well, I decided to steal the last of it. I walked even further into my angel’s person bubble, never taking my eyes off his—never once looking away from that devastating blue fire of his eyes. Part of me, a part that had been withering and dying for days since the episode with the escort, was screaming and kicking and trying to get the hell out of Dodge. But like I said, it was too dead to even put up much of a fight.

I didn’t just want this. I _needed_ this. Needed to not only know for myself, but to let him know too.

It was easy to slip my hand around the back of his head. Easy to curl my fingers in that jet black hair and pull his face to mine. And when I finally kissed him for real…well, I ain’t going into details on that. It was a kiss, after all, and everyone knows what those are like. I’ve had so many in my life since the age of sixteen—not the playground kisses, but the real, lip-blistering kisses—that I’d started taking them for granted. All I can really say about kissing Cas was that it was different for more reasons than just him being a dude.

And it also made me feel really fucking warm; the warmest I’d ever felt, right in the pit of my tummy. Not just butterflies warm—a big, fat kitty cat snoozing in a patch of sunlight for hours on end warm; stepping into a freshly drawn bathtub filled with water that seeps into every part of your skin and takes all the aches away warm. Everything I’d ever held onto—everything I’d ever been afraid of or angry about was suddenly put into a coma, lulled to sleep by the feeling of so-fucking-rightness that kissing Castiel made me feel. It was like I’d swallowed a Jigglypuff.

When we broke apart again, it felt like lightning had scorched the floor between us. You’d have thought that I’d ran from Fresno to Fort Charles from how hard I was breathing.

“That was…” I didn’t know what to say. Didn’t really know if I should have said anything. Cas brushed his fingers over his lips, as if kissing me had burned them or something.

I thought he was going to kiss me again. Hell, I wanted him to. He looked into my eyes, but not like he was x-raying me—not the way he usually did. It was like he was seeing something different, something that wasn’t entirely the muscle and blood me.

Something that scared the shit out of him, if the look on his face was anything to go by.

I’m used to disappointment. Hell, after everything I’ve been through, disappointment is like saying that I won a free Jumbo Shrimp Sunday at Long John Silver’s. But when Cas responded to locking lips with me by just walking away and starting to pack his shit, I felt something worse than disappointment. Worse than pain or loss. It was like I’d been shown a huge pile of money only to have someone light it up with a flamethrower. I’d just figured it out, at least more than I’d had since Sam had gone. I wasn’t scared shitless of feeling anything for my angel; I’d crossed the line, and now it he’d shut down faster than a dial-up connection during a game of telephone tag.

And yeah, I wanted to ask why. I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and give him the what for. But I did what I do best: chickened out when it mattered most. What can I say? Have you ever been scared to death that someone would tell you exactly what you were afraid to hear? I was. What if he’d told me that I’d crossed a line? That I’d got it all wrong, and that he really wasn’t into me that way? I’d never been afraid of that kind of thing with women, but if what my life had turned into since Sam had been flung into the Pit had taught me anything, it was that I was fast turning to face the strange and going through ch-ch-changes.

So I did jack all. After getting whatever of my faculties together that I could, I started packing my stuff too. We headed out in ten minutes and were on the highway in one.

Cas didn’t do a whole hell of a lot for the next few days on our way to Washington. Unless you count staring out the window with his eyebrows all scrunched up as doing something, in which case he made out like a bandit. But you know who didn’t make out like a bandit? This little starfish. It felt like I had beetles under my skin and locusts in my brain. We talked, yeah, but those conversations were few and far between and always about nothing. I was too damn scared of stepping on the invisible trip wire that had been set up after I’d had that kiss with him. So yeah. The weather, how far we’d come since we started this bad road trip movie…talking about nothing to avoid losing everything.

And no, we didn’t share a bed again. The first night we stopped at a motel after our little tongue-wrestling match, and Cas quietly asked the metrosexual looking dude at the Holiday Express if we could have two queen beds, I had to bite my tongue to stop myself from looking bummed out.

Two sleepless nights later and we were rolling into some cabin-type place in Moses Lake. It'd only just stopped piss-pouring rain; everything smelled like fresh pine and soaked tree bark. The air was clean and crisp and the sky clear, showing bright stars and a moon like a slice of silver.

“One room please.” It’s the same old song and dance, one that’s as natural as breathing and having a cutting six pack…at least, to me. The woman behind the counter smirked.

“I’m afraid our only vacancy is for a single King size. Not that that’s a problem for you two, I hope.”

I wished, for the first time in my nigh-on three decades of hunting, that she had it right for once. I missed the feeling of him next to me—been dying to taste him again, to feel that blazing rightness in my gut and through my veins.

Cas lets out a bitchy huff from behind me—like he couldn’t think of anything worse than having to share a bed with me. It hit me like a knife between the shoulder blades, but there wasn't a chance in Hell I was going to go snoozing in Baby when I could have a soft featherbed in this little slice of rustic heaven.

“It’s all good.” I gave the lady my best little-boy smile, and she melted a little. Cas didn’t say anything. Just followed me down the patio to our room, which smelled like the outdoors even though it was as toasty warm as the best part of a campfire.

Because the silence is made me feel like upchucking, I dropped my bag on the carpet and said, “You wanna grab a shower first before I call dibs?”

Speaking with his face to the ugly, old television, Cas said, “No. It’s okay. Go ahead.”

He was really making a case for the monosyllabic and it made me want to grab him by the back of his sweater and yank him to attention. I’m not one for domestic violence at all, which is a real kicker given who my old man was. Not to get too into it, but there was a rough few years in my early teens when Pops had me believing that I was such a dummy the way that my face looked.

“Cas…” 

He stiffened at my voice, and not in the way I wanted him to. _Please look at me_ , I thought, as if I had suddenly gone all Emma Frost and had the power to speak telepathically with him. _Just look at me for ten goddamn seconds_.

“Yes, Dean?” He was still talking to the Panasonic. I’d never wanted to put my foot through a TV screen more in my entire life.

A million thoughts came rushing to me all at once, but I my tongue refused to let them out. Instead, I just let out the most pathetic kind of sigh.

“Nothing.”

I stood under the shower for a long time. I thought back to that first day after he’d popped back into my life—how he’d seen me taking a leak, and how he’d still been hanging around when I’d walked out of the shower without a towel to hide my boys. I mean, yeah, it had kinda had the making of the start of a bad porno, but looking back it didn’t bother me as much.

Nothing bothered me about Cas, about what we were turning into. Except for the fact that he’d completely frosted over after I’d kissed him that day. I slammed my fist against the tile wall, which accomplished dick shit except for making my knuckles hurt and possibly kickstarting my journey into early adult onset arthritis. I was sick of everything—sick of not getting what I wanted. Considering what most assholes in the world do to get what they want, I was practically virgin as the driven snow. I couldn’t have _my_ family, couldn’t have _a_ family; couldn’t know peace, or forget, or feel, or think. And now, when it looked as though something really, really good—something unexpected but so much more wonderful than I’d ever thought possible in my life—was coming my way, it was being yanked out of my grasp.

Well, I don’t know about you kids, but I have my limits. And at that moment, I was sick and tired of not even getting the short end of the stick.

I shut the water off, threw a towel around my waist, and walked out of that bathroom. Cas was still unpacking, as if there was enough shit in the duffle I’d made up for him to take out in the space of twenty minutes. And this time he did turn around to talk to me. His eyes went all wide and round again, and he backed into the bed, almost toppling over. If I hadn’t been so busy walking within two feet of his personal bubble, I probably would have been smiling like The Joker.

“D-Dean?” His voice cracked. Like cracked. I’m talking throes of puberty, awkward boners, coming in his sleep, tripping over his own feet cracked.

“You were expecting someone a little less soaking wet and nearly naked?”

“Wh-what are you doing?”

“Making you uncomfortable, obviously.” The temptation to stand there being a wiseass was almost too overwhelming. But I knew that I had to lay it all on the line then and there. Call it some kind weird clairvoyant shit, but I had to nip this thing in the bud because if I didn’t, I knew that I wouldn’t get what it was that I needed. “Think we need to talk about this, Cas.”

“There’s nothing to talk about, Dean.”

“Don’t go pulling that shit on me, alright? You’re looking at the king of avoidance issues. You’ve had something on your mind since…since that night.”

Cas cleared his throat. “Wh-what night?”

“Don’t bullshit me, Cas. You know? That night when I had my tongue in your mouth and vice versa?”

He turned red, and I really regretted my choice of damp terrycloth towel because seeing Cas blush like that kickstarted the beginning of what promised to be a serious stiffie.

He didn’t say anything. He just stared at the carpet, his face screwed up like he’d been asked to think about the deeper meaning of the works of Adam Sandler. And that silence scared me more than any of the quiet time we’d had since Idaho. “Cas, please.” I tried to keep just how badly I wanted it—wanted him—out of my voice, but I didn’t exactly pass with flying colors of the Pride rainbow. “You’re my angel...”

Cas took a deep breath, and when he looked at me, it just about knocked me on my ass. “I don’t want to be anymore.”

My insides started dissolving. I wanted to die at that moment. I’d finally come to terms with the fact that I was gay for Castiel, and I’d been some damn certain that he felt the same way too. I hadn’t counted on being wrong.

“Be what?” I tried to sound like his answer wouldn’t matter. But once again I’m pretty sure I failed. I was just happy that I didn’t say, “Be mine?”

“Be an angel.”

That, I hadn’t expected. “What?”

“I don’t want to be an angel, anymore Dean.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to be like you. I want to be human, Dean. I want to feel everything that you feel: the good, the bad…all of it. I want to know what it’s like to appreciate finality. I want to be able to relate to the things that people around me are feeling and thinking. Humans are just ants to angels, and I hate them for that…I hate myself for that, even though I’m the most human angel there is. I want to be what you are so I can feel at least a little closer to you. If anything happens to you, I want to know that I can have the choice of still being like you, knowing like you know. I don’t want you to be alone." 

I’d never heard him speak more than a few paragraphs on the best of days, so this sudden flood of words stunned me into silence for a second. And it wasn’t just that he’d spoken them, either. It was the way he’d said them. With some much fire, so much meaning. It was human, the most human he’d ever sounded, even more than when he’d told the Man Upstairs to go get bent.

I couldn’t think of what to say, so I just said what I’d said before. “Why?”

His eyes were like fucking tractor beams, pulling me in and keeping me frozen on the spot. That same fire was still in his voice, and I call it fire because it had the power to warm and also scorch a path of hot pain unlike anything I’d ever known in my life and afterlife.

“Because…Dean, I love you.” Funny how sometimes simple words can sound like gunfire, isn’t it? Even funnier when they feel just like being shot at point blank range.

He was baring himself to me by telling me this, making himself more than naked. His face was still a little red; he wasn’t used to doing this, to be so fucking honest. It was scaring him, and I didn’t want him to be scared because he was still my angel, even if he didn’t wanna be anymore.

“I love you,” Cas went on. “I can feel it in here.” He rubbed his fist over his heart. “And it hurts so much sometimes. Whenever you’re angry or sad and won’t talk to me or let me help, it hurts worse than when Michael made me explode. And when you’re not…when you let me in and talk to me, it feels…it feels warm. Like in that movie we watched together that night after Sam went to The Pit. It just feels like there’s a sun inside of me and that hurts too, but in a good way. I’ve been so alone, always alone. Not feeling, not ever speaking the way that I did after I met you. You kissed me that night…you feel asleep in my arms and I thought that I would take a millennium in The Pit if I could just have that every time we fell asleep.” His face went even redder as he said, “And when I saw you that one night when you were…touching yourself…I thought and felt things that confused me. I was scared for so long, but I didn’t say anything because I knew you were too. But I know why I was afraid now, and it’s because I love you, Dean.”

Nothing I’d ever been through in my life could have prepared me for that. Nothing I’ve ever been through in my life compared to the way his words made me feel. I wanted to run away; to push him onto the bed and fuck his brains out. The whole thing felt like something out of some contrived piece of fanfiction. But it was very real; Cas was very in front of me, he’d actually said all those things to my face, and I was very, very out of my depth.

I didn’t know what to do.

So Cas decided to do something for me.

He grabbed me by the shoulders and shoved me to the mattress. My whelm was still so overed from what he’d just said that I wasn’t really seeing what he was driving at until it was too late. Until I felt the softness of the mattress under my ass. Until I felt the warm air in the room on my bare skin as Cas pulled the towel off of my waist.

“Cas!” I tried to stand. Don’t really know why, seeing as how my dick sprang to attention in the space of about a microsecond. But Cas had his hands—those big, but real soft hands of his—right on my solar plexus. He pushed me back, his eyes fixed on my hard cock like it was the most precious treasure in the world.

Then he wrapped his lips around it, and any resistance I had died a quiet, sudden death.


	9. Five Hundred and Four Hours and Eight Minutes

I’m the king of dirty talk during sex. When I started adding some polish to my game, I realized that adding Jeff Stryker-levels of filth to doing the nasty gets me off harder and gets other people off as well. I never failed to let my freak out verbally no matter who I was with,

But with him—with my angel—I couldn’t speak. All my dirty talking goodness had up and left me, the way that any and all sexual response had the night I’d tried to hire the call girl. There was nothing I could say. I mean, when you get down to brass tacks, what the fuck is there to say when getting your dick sucked? “Oh, fuck, that feels good.” Yeah, no shit it feels good—you’ve got someone’s lips around your erection.

So maybe it was for the best that Cas had stolen my voice when he’d started going down on me. And goddamn, could he ever go down. Like I said before, I’m no slouch when it comes to inches—not that I’m crazy big, mind you. Only some self-conscious, piece of shit, pickle-titted mama’s boy would, say, sell their soul to push things over into the double digits. Women don’t like that shit—neither do men—no matter what romance novels try to tell you.

Cas’s tongue was wreaking fucking havoc on my tip, swirling around it like it was a goddamn popsicle. I stared down at him sucking me off—I couldn’t help it. Not like it was my first blowjob, but damn it if it wasn’t the best. His mouth was warmer and wetter than anything I’d ever had my cock in before. I’ve got some incredible stamina, but the way he was taking me further and further in just about drove me over the edge too soon. He went a little too far, and coughed—the vibrations around my dick felt so fucking good, but I didn’t want him to literally choke on me.

“S-slow down.” I whispered the words, pushing him ever so slightly off of my dick. Cas’s eyes met mine, and his nostrils flared as he caught his breath. I felt his fingers, so long and so fucking graceful, move up my thigh. They felt like spiders, so soft and gentle but capable of sending a million shivers racing through my body. 

He cupped my balls, rolling them as he licked and sucked me in a way I’d never been licked and sucked before.

I wanna say that I lasted for a long damn time. I mean, I do have tremendous staying power under normal circumstances. But being blown by A) another dude who B) I really, really fucking cared about pushed me to the limits in the space of about eight minutes flat. 

The tightness in my tummy was the same as every other time before I popped—same thing with the heat in my nuts. Cas wasn’t going to stop anytime soon, though, and as appealing as the idea of filling his throat with my come was, I knew he wasn’t going to be able to take it without coughing.

“Cas.” My voice was a raspy hiss, like I’d swallowed case of rusty shotgun shells.

My warning went over his head. He kept licking and sucking—kept fondling my balls like the precious jewels they were. I swear he actually nipped his teeth into my super-sensitive head. I bucked, feeling that loaded gun in my gut ready to fire. But I didn’t wanna do it like this, didn’t wanna overwhelm him with over a week’s worth of pent up jizz.

Somehow, in the space between him trying to fit even more of me into his mouth and me actually shooting my load, I was able to sit up, take him by the shoulders and push him away. My cock left his lips; I swear to God he actually started to pout at the absence. But when he saw me take my Johnson by the base and start jerking off with the speed of a bullet train, he perked right the fuck back up, watching me with his beautiful blue eyes. And I didn’t look away as I came, forcing myself to hold his gaze.

I’m not one to go for that flowery bullshit when it comes to how it feels when I pop. I’ve done it so many damn times in my life that it’s almost boring to talk about after a while. But with Cas there, watching me, his spit still coating my dick and his lips all shiny—well, it felt like fucking molten fire and white lightning all at the same time. I’ve never come so hard in my life—ropes of creamy jizz spurted from my dick, splattering my thighs and my stomach. I could’ve come on his face, but doing so seemed—I don’t know…dirty. I know it’s so screwed up coming from me, pun completely intended. But I didn’t wanna stain Cas’s perfect face with something as filthy sweet as my cum.

Didn’t really matter in the end, ‘cause I pulled Cas onto the bed with me and fucked his brains out.

Only joking.

There’s this thing called a refractory period. Kinda makes it impossible for dudes to get a boner right after busting a nut. 

I collapsed back onto the mattress, staring at the ceiling. Before I had the chance to contemplate (read: panic) what had really just happened, or feel the familiar sticky discomfort of jizz drying on my skin, I felt something soft and wet sliding up my thigh.

Looking down just about finished me off. Cas was lapping at the streaks of cum on my skin like a hungry little sex kitten.

Pretty fucking hot, right? Well, it also kinda weirded me out. Not because it was another guy eating my come, but because it was my angel. Cas just didn’t do things like that.

I sat up, crossing my legs like some virginal little schoolgirl. Still not breathing entirely evenly, I said, “What the hell was that?”

Cas cocked his head to the side. “I believe that was fellatio, Dean.”

“I know what it was, Cas. And it was pretty…pretty fucking awesome but where the hell did you learn to do that?”

“From the pizza man.”

“ _What_?!”

Cas sat up, wiped his lips on the back of his hand, which caused Little Dean to make a noble effort to prove science wrong about that refractory period bullshit.

“I watched one of those films,” Cas said. “The one you need your credit card for.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “You watched porn?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to know what you needed me to do. What you would like. The pizza man in that film liked it when the babysitter performed fellatio on him.”

He sounded so damn la-dee-dah about it. But he’d done it for me—subjected himself to the horrendous beauty of porn just because he wanted to make me feel good, and goddamn had he ever.

I patted the mattress next to me. “C’mere.”

Apparently my angel had been sitting on springs the entire time. He just about launched himself off the hardwood floor to sit next to me. Mid-leap, I grabbed him by the wrist, spun him around and plopped him onto my lap.

“What’re you doing?” I’d never heard him slur his words before. The fact that it was me who’d done this to him made me grin like a fucking fox. I nipped at his earlobe—what can I say? I’m an impulsive dude. Cas squirmed, grinding his ass into my still limp and spent dick.

“What am I doing?” My lips brushed against his ear at the same time that my fingers started making quick work of his belt, button and zipper. “Paying it forward, man.”

He shivered so damn hard that I was afraid he’d turn into a chunk of ice right then and there. But of course he didn’t, although given the general theme of my life, it was still a legit concern.

No, Cas didn’t turn into ice.

He looked down, watching as my fingers tucked inside his fly, as if I was breaking into some kind of forbidden treasure trove. His skin was warm, and he was so fucking hard that it almost shocked me.

I’ve never held another man’s cock before. Never really given it entirely much thought—well, I mean, there was like this one time during this stay in Canada when I was like, nineteen. But nobody goes through life without thinking gay thoughts at least once. My fingers shook before I finally wrapped them around Cas’s dick. It felt…well, I mean, it felt like a dick, right? Not as big as my own—but hot and hard and kinda wet. Cas was cut, and I could feel the precum already collecting at his tip, all slick and warm like the finest lube in the world.

“ _De-ean_!” Cas’s voice broke, and it was like a shotgun at the beginning of a horse race. There was definitely no going back from this. With as much care as if I were holding something really fucking precious, I pulled his dick out of his pants, and then, just because I like to do things real proper like, slid his pants down to his ankles.

I could feel myself getting hard again; the blood was rushing from my head to my cock in record speed, making me feel dizzy but in the best possible way. Cas was so solid on my lap—so warm and squirmy and so right. The weight of him, the feel of him—the scent and sound of him as I stroked him off…I’m not much for waxing poetic, but it really was like I had something heavenly with me, something bigger and better and more precious than anything I’d had in my entire life. 

“Feels good, huh?” My words whispered like the breeze against Cas’s jaw.

“Uh-huh.” I loved that I was doing this to him, depriving him of anything resembling real speech. My dick had reached critical hardness again, the ache so fucking amazing what with the weight off Cas’s perfect little ass against it. I gave an experimental rut of my hips, savoring the friction as my cock slid between Cas’s ass cheeks.

“Oh, Jesus!”

I stopped my rutting, but kept jerking Cas off. No force in Heaven, Hell or on Earth was going to stop me from doing that. “That’s a little blasphemous, don’t you think?”

Cas turned his head a fraction of an inch to the left. “Don’t care.” Fuck me, but his face was all pink and pretty. His lips were parted too, and his eyes had this glazed over look like he’d been making the acquaintance of the finest Scotch in the world. I didn’t think it was possible for me to find anything other than the temptation of his ass or the slick hardness of his dick so goddamn inviting. But that look...I’d seen something like it on the faces of dozens of chicks in my life, but on my angel? It was like it had the power to destroy me. 

The hand that wasn’t wreaking havoc on his heavenly sword snaked up his back. I cupped him by his chin and pulled his face to mine. When we kissed this time it was like fire and ice and lightning all at once. There were so many sensations—from my own cock still grinding into his ass, to my fingers curled around his leaking cock, to his tongue and lips doing things to my mouth that would have put Valentino to shame. 

It was the perfect overload. Cas moaned into my mouth, biting at my lip. Through the complete electric storm of feeling, I was able to hear him say my name: “Dean…I’m going to…I’m going to…”

“It’s okay,” I whispered, stealing his air as we continued to kiss. “It’s okay.” I felt Cas tense on my lap. My fingers stroked him faster, slickening him from base to sensitive tip. Cas moaned into my mouth, long and loud and hard. His body tensed at just about the same time that mine did. I felt him pulse; felt the whiplash in the pit of my own gut.

Yeah.

We came at the same time.

That, at least, is the one thing I’ll grant Chuck’s little smut squad actually did happen.

And you know what else is fucking awesome? I’d never had that happen with a woman before.

I felt Cas’s jizz coat my hand, but still I didn’t stop stroking him. Hey, I’m a dude, remember? It might have been my first time at the rodeo, so to speak, but I know what it takes to make another guy feel good. I was so damn focused on feeling him ride out his own orgasm that I didn’t really know I’d stopped cumming until all the strength went out of me and I toppled back onto the mattress, my angel still sitting on my lap.

We were both breathing heavily, the sound filling the room like the noise of the ocean. I lifted my hand from Cas’s dick, looking at the pearly mess covering my fingers.

Remember what I said about impulse control?

Well, curiosity seized me by my recently drained nutsack and I raised my fingers to my lips. The heady whiff of semen filled my nose and I decided to…

…wipe my fingers on the sheets. Hey, I may have made some serious strides, but there were still a few things I knew I was going to have to ease into. Not that the idea of eating Cas’s come wasn’t appealing; it just wasn’t something I thought I needed to do then.

Still collapsed on me, Cas looked into my eyes. He’d gone a little tense, as if he was afraid I was going to suddenly start panicking again.

But some lines can’t be un-crossed. And I would have had to have been all kinds of insane to have even wanted to go back over this one. So I wrapped my arm around his shoulder and pulled him close.

“Feel better?”

It was all I could think to say, because my power of speech seemed to have been blown out of the end of my cock with that second orgasm.

“Mhm.” Cas actually purred, like he was a lion that had tired itself out by roaring for hours on end.

My eyes started drooping. If there’s one thing busting a nut will do to a guy, it’s make him sleepy as all get out. If there’s one thing that busting a nut twice in the space of half an hour will to do a guy, it’s outstrip Ambien in terms of being a sedative.

But just before I nodded off, my arm around my perfect angel, I had a thought. Not really a thought, more like a memory. A memory of the conversation we’d had before things had taken a turn for the Colby Keller.

He’d said he didn’t want to be an angel anymore. But if he didn’t wanna be an angel, then that meant he’d be human. And humans could die. And if he died too…well, I wouldn’t want death. I’d want oblivion.

I slept for a little bit, dreaming of darkness and nothing. It felt like hours, but when I woke up it was only about fifteen minutes later. That was the first thing I realized. The second thing, and I felt like a horse’s ass for not noticing it, was that the bed beside me was empty, and Cas wasn’t in the room anymore.


	10. Five Hundred and Five Hours

I’m not going to beat around the bush—the first thing I did after running around the cabin like a headless chicken looking for Cas was sit my pert little booty on the edge of the bed and start with the waterworks.

Yeah.

I cry.

That’s something I’ll openly admit to ‘cause I’m secure in the knowledge that I’m just that much of a mess. Far as I’m concerned, everyone should cry, no matter what gender, sexual orientation, religion or kind of karaoke singer they are. Crying’s good for you, and given all the assorted shit I’ve been through in my life, I’m entitled to letting the tears flow.

I mean, I wasn’t exactly going all Blake Lively in _Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants_ levels of falling to pieces—and yes, I’ve seen that movie because Blake Lively is fucking beautiful.

My head just kinda fell in my hands. I felt like I was trapped in this strange negative space where I couldn’t think, but where my mind was also going faster than the Energizer Bunny. Cas was gone, and I didn’t know where he was. I saw little flashes of all the messed up, terrible shit that had happened to me and Sam over the years—somehow my brain managed to make me start to think that it was going to happen to my angel.

My chest got all tight. I couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t fair, but it was still so fucking typically Dean Winchester’s Life for this to happen. I’d finally found something so important to me, something that made me feel less like the royal screw up I was, and now it was gone.

‘Course, that feeling didn’t last long. One of the other many things I’m good at aside from bringing women and now angels to a shuddering orgasm is getting a grip on myself. I mean, yeah I freak out like everyone else, but it never lasts long. I don’t mean to sound like a therapist, but I think it’s got something to do with seeing dear old departed Dad fly off the handle for sometimes weeks on end. I hated it growing up—not as much as Sam used to hate it, but still…somewhere I made a pinky promise to myself that I wasn’t going to get my BVD’s in a bind (not that I wear those, by the way—I’m either briefs or commando) longer than was absolutely necessary.

I bucked up, wiped my eyes and cleared my head. I threw on some sweats and a muscle shirt and a hoodie and decided that now was as good a time as any to start making like a bloodhound and sniff out the best thing that had ever happened to me.

To be honest, I was still kinda fuming when I stepped out the door of the cabin—still having to chew on my own tongue to stop myself from thinking about all the maybe this’s and maybe that’s that could have taken Cas from me.

It had rained again sometime between Cas and I getting to our cabin and us falling asleep together. That smell of a fresh downpour—of rich, wet earth, soaked pine bark and clean air was almost like an exorcism for the ugly feelings of anxiety and anger that had snuck into my brain space.

And what’s more, the rain proved to be a real added bonus in what I’d thought was going to be a long, overly complicated search for my angel. ‘Cause once I stepped foot off the little porch in front of our cabin, I noticed tracks in the mud and grass—tracks shaped like a man’s size ten Vans.

Hey, I’m a hunter. I can track people, animals, demons, monsters, and oogie-boogies no sweat. 

Luck is something that is never usually on my side, unless you define that as a leprechaun trying to shiv me in the ribs with a sharpened chicken bone. So I was so not turning my nose up at the little trail of breadcrumbs I’d found.

I followed Cas’s footprints down the path that lead to the nature trail. I lost sight of the motel sign by the time the tracks veered off the path and into the forest. Lesser mortals would have given up the ghost then, but I, not really being a lesser mortal, wasn’t about to throw in the towel. My angel hadn’t been careful, and it wasn’t hard to follow the broken twigs, and kicked up clods of dirt that he’d left on his little midnight hike.

Still, even though I’d managed to find this little jackpot, I couldn’t quite stop my mind from jumping to the worst conclusions. He’d said that he hadn’t wanted to be an angel anymore, and while that was all fine and dandy, I didn’t exactly imagine Heaven being a place willing to listen to him at the moment. Besides, if he became human, then he could be hurt—I’d seen too many people I loved bloody, bruised, broken and worse to want to repeat the experience.

I mean, Cas isn’t exactly a defenseless eleven-year-old kid. But he relied on his angel mojo so much—hell, I’d come to rely on it. I didn’t want him to get hurt, didn’t want to see him in pain. He was like a fuzzy little newborn kitten, needing to be protected, and it was up to big, burly German shepherd me to do that.

My trek through the woods was going on longer and longer. And the longer it went on, the more disoriented and frustrated I got. Pine needles scratched at my face, and I almost kissed the dust at one point. I even somehow managed to get a tree branch to the nutsack. And all the while, I kept seeing Cas in my mind’s eye—kept seeing him hurt or dying—kept seeing him get blown up the way he had in that fucking cemetery.

I had almost started in with the crying game again when I half-fell into this huge ass clearing in the middle of the woods. It had been so long since I’d seen the sky in full since leaving the motel that it was almost unbearably bright to me at first.

The first thing I saw were the stars. Our little buddy trip across the interstate had taken us to the middle of nowhere in one of the most beautiful parts of the Pacific Northwest. There wasn’t a city for miles and miles, and the lack of light pollution meant that the sky was lit up like Vegas at night. 

But I’d never seen it like this before.

The tops of the pines were black against the night sky. There were billions of stars out, like a swarm of platinum fireflies. There wasn’t a cloud in sight, only there sort of was. I’d never seen a glimpse of the galaxy before, but in that clearing I could see something even better than all the magic I’d ever seen—the positive anyway. Clouds of gas—all orange and gold shot through with black, spiraling in the sky like spilled champagne. And there were other colors too: all blue-green and purple.

I stood there with my many bumps, scrapes and bruises, my mouth hanging open like some retarded monkey, staring at this glimpse of the universe.

Then something moved down in the meadow.

Something with a familiar mop of black hair.

Cas was down there.

It was like someone had put rockets in my shoes. I tore towards him, so fucking relieved to find him alive. Then I stopped, kicking up dirt as I tried not to face plant for the second time.

Cas was staring at the brilliant, beautiful sky above. And as I watched, it looked as if a piece of the sky started to come out of him. A beautiful array of colors and starlight started to seep out of him—a steady stream of something amazing and celestial being fed back into the universe. 

I knew what it was without really knowing how.

He was giving up the angel in him. And that scared the shit out of me.

“Wait!” I sprinted the rest of the way down the clearing, but the light had been siphoned out of him before I even got close. He fell, his body limp like he’d been slammed against a brick wall or something. The fear that had been bubbling under the surface of my brain broke loose. I didn’t know what I would find when I got to him—whether or not he’d be alive or if his body would still even be there.

But he was there. And he was breathing. I crouched down, slid my arm behind him and held him up.

“Cas?”

His eyes were half-open, bright blue like fucking sapphires watching me under his eyelashes. 

The implications of what I’d just seen him do hit me like a concrete truck to the balls. He’d given up his angel DNA, so that didn’t technically make him an angel anymore. Did that mean that Castiel himself was gone? That there was nothing left of my angel, just the person whose body he’d taken over?

“Cas…?” No, it did not sound like I was going to cry.

He smiled at me, a lazy, drunk kinda smile.

“Dean.” My name on his lips sounded like it was a life giving potion. He circled his arms around me, and I pulled him close, too fucking relieved that he was still here, still mine, to say or do anything. He smelled like the earth, all wild and raw and natural. He still felt the same in my arms—still the same strong body—still the same warm skin.

I knew he was human. Full and truly human.

“Why?” I breathed the word into the top of his head. “Why’d you take off, huh? Scared me half to death.”

Cas tilted his head up, smiling a little. “Because you’d have stopped me. And I wanted to do this for you.” He touched the side of my face, making me shiver like I’d just been doused with a bucket of icy water. “You’re not mad at me are you?”

“Not mad. Just…just scared.”

Cas righted himself, so that we were both kneeling in front of each other on the wet ground. “Scared? Why? You don’t have to be alone now, Dean. Ever again. I can be with you and age with you. Why would that make you afraid? Unless...you don't want--

"Don't even go there, featherbrain. Of course I fucking want you." I thought back the feeling of his mouth on me back in the motel room. Goosebumps erupted on my arms, although that could have been more from the chilly night air than anything else.

"Then what's wrong?"

Old Dean tried to make one last feeble effort to come back to life. And yeah, part of me wanted old Dean back. But like Sam, old Dean was gone. And it wasn’t the big Shakespearean tragedy I’d been making it out to be, after all.

I looked into Cas’s eyes, seeing the stars and that beautiful galaxy in the sky reflected in them.

“I’m scared because…I don’t want you to get hurt. I don’t want to lose you or…or feel that pain again. The one that you get when you…lose someone that you love.”

I’d said it. And it wasn’t like a gunshot or a firework destroying the peace in the woods. It was just a word, but a word that meant so goddamn much. Funny, huh? We make such a big deal about magic and exorcisms and shit, but we never really appreciate how much the words we use every day can actually have power of their own.

“You love me?”

“ ‘Course I do, you big dope.” I smiled, then stood up and brushed the dirt off of my sweats. “Couldn’t love you more if I tried.” I helped him up. It was almost stupid easy to say those words to him. Then, because I wanted to and because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time, I pulled him into my arms, feeling how hard and warm he was against my chest.

I kissed him. A real kiss this time, nipping his bottom lip with my teeth and pushing my tongue into his mouth and just about losing my mind at how good he tasted. See, I can be all descriptive and shit about these things. Eat your heart out, Sherrilyn Kenyon.

Breathless again, we broke apart. Cas’s head lolled onto my shoulder and for a long time we just kinda stood there staring at the visible fragment of the galaxy in the sky. Thinking about that piece of the universe that had been taken out of my angel, I said, “Hey Cas…is that where they go?” I nodded at the sky. “Y’know…is that where we really go when we don’t go to Heaven?” 

I heard the smile in his voice. “Yes. It is. There are things out there bigger and greater than even angels and demons. Places better than Heaven and places worse than Hell.”

My watch beeped, an alarm I’d set to remind me to check the area. I’m a creature of habit, and even though I was seriously considering becoming semi-retired from all things hunting, I still hadn’t grown out of my security habit.

It was after midnight.

And it had been twenty one days since I’d lost Sam. Twenty-one days since Cas had blipped into that shitty motel room and stopped me from blowing my brains out. It had seemed like forever, but what was twenty-one days but three measly weeks?

I shifted, feeling a little foolish for saying what I was about to say. It was so damn childish, given that I knew the answer for myself, but still…I couldn’t really help myself.

“Do you think that…I mean, Sam and Adam and—

“Yes, Dean.” And there was something about his voice, so steady and pure, which made me understand that he wasn’t lying just to save my feelings. “They’re up there now. All of them.”

They were. And we were down here, safe for now, and in love and so fucking crazy, but what the hell did it matter? For once I was happy. For once, I didn’t feel it necessary to get up in the morning and tang with my self-loathing. I had my angel—even if he wasn’t really an angel anymore—and if we could have for just one human lifetime what it must be like to be up there with those stars and clouds, then maybe that was enough.

Pain, suffering, loss—all that bullshit? The fuck does it matter when you’ve got someone who will give up Heaven itself for you? What the fuck does it matter when you’ve already been to Hell for someone else? 

I pulled Cas closer to me, watching the stars and the infinity. We’d be okay. There are a lot of hours in a day, after all. Long as we had each other to fill those hours up with something other than me hating myself and focusing on nothing but the shitty things that had made my life.

As long as I had my angel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's all folks. Thanks for sticking with it! Hope you let me know what you thought.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm really pleased to announce that I found a publisher for my original novel, Monster In My Closet. It's an LGBT horror-romance, and it's going to hopefully be published by upcoming house Wandering Gypsy Publishing. I just did an interview with the editor last week, and if anyone is interested, they can read it here: http://bit.ly/2jT0aZa
> 
> Also it'd be really great if you could give them a follow on Twitter. They're going to be doing some amazing things, especially in terms of LGBT books and authors. Follow them here if you'd like: http://bit.ly/2jFx7e1
> 
> Other than that, I'll be updating this as often as a I can. There won't be many parts, but I should have it done for sure before March :P


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